This kind of thing seems like it could lead to rampant abuse, or at least error if someone winds up on one of these lists that shouldn't be on it.
Yep. And they got the color wrong, too.
This is not a "red flag". It's a government-maintained "blacklist":
- It creates a broad penalty for anyone they put on the list, making it virtually impossible for them to get or hold a well-paying job, buy a house, buy a car, or do most of the other big-ticket business of life.
- Putting people on it is done in secret and without legal due process, for reasons other than imposing statutory penalties for conviction of violating a published law. No opportunity to confront witnesses against them or challenge the process - either as they're being added or to remove themselves afterward.
- The list is effectively secret. It's known to the business people but is virtually unknown to the people on it, who get no notification that they've on it or even that it exists.
I find it also fascinating that if you presented this in non-internet terms, the citizens would be up in arms.
Here's another example that might be more obvious to the ordinary citizen:
"There are places where criminal voice communication is centralized: the telephone switches located in central offices across the country. All of the telephone network's activity, legal and illegal, flows through these 'choke points,' and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off the signals. What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the content of all the telephone calls, which are already being siphoned off by the NSA, in order to look for illegal activity."
The descriptions of "the error-detecting hat" look like the intent is to train the brain to stay alert and not make errors - or to refocus it when it wanders. (DING DING DING! HEY! WAKE UP! PAY ATTENTION!) The hat may be useful, but that use of the feedback may be the wrong approach.
The signature they're describing corresponds, not just to a lack of alertness, but specifically a lack of alertness because the brain is going into a resting state. Seems to me that might be because all this decision-making has made the working regions of the brain tired and the brain is trying to clear them out so they'll operate properly again. So the problem is not the lack of alertness, but the attempt to continue to make decisions during the resting cycle.
Given that, a better use of the feedback might be to tell the wearer that it's time to stop making important decisions and take a break, rather than trying to overuse a "mental muscle" that's exhausted - and perhaps train him to recognize the mental state himself so he can then dispense with the hat.
The "break times" in working days were set up when studies showed that taking breaks, despite the "work time lost", resulted in more and better work in the work time remaining. This looks like a way to optimize the process, rather than running breaks on a clock.
This is not a dupe. (At least not of the previous one you linked.)
The old article you linked is about detecting a signature corresponding to an early stage of decision making. This one is about detecting a signature of the brain going into a resting / attention wandering state that causes decisions to be error-prone.
If you are a carrier in telephony, you should have many load-balanced servers that can be taken offline one at a time and restored after patching.
Servers be damned.
If you are a carrier in telephony, virtually all your subscribers have a connection consisting of a single line terminated by a singe box at the edge of your network (sometimes a series string of single-boxes each doing different parts of the job.) When anything makes that box unavailable, even for moments, all the customers whose sole connection is through it are down. That might be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of them.
Such boxes are designed for "six-nines" uptime targets. Redundant power supplies, redundant control processors, redundant interconnects between cards, redundant uplinks, redundant FANS, backplanes with no active components, software designed with separately replacable and restartable modules, etc.
And yes they DO run for years without a reboot. (In fact even servers do. For instance: The servers at the baby bells that record the billing records generated at the connect, answer, and end of a call. Some of those have been up for years - with minor patches queued for the next time some mishap makes them reboot.)
... many sci-fi writers who seem to "predict" what technology will come to pass are really just up on current blue-sky research.
And sometimes they're the ones that DO the blue-sky research. (Examples: Clarke's work on the instrument landing system - which he later fictionalized as _Glide Path_. Ian Fleming and Eric Frank Russel being two of the brain trust in the WWII British "department of dirty tricks" - again later recycled into a number of stories by each.)
And sometimes they're the ones that inspire the research or design. (Example: The clamshell communicator in Star Trek - inspiring Motorola's Star Tak cellphone.)
And a big part of the point of this new MAHEM technology seems to be defeating reactive armor.
Reactive armor uses a small explosive on the outer layer, triggered by the incoming jet of metal, to defocus the jet before it penetrates the inner layer. Using electric currents and magnetic fields generated mostly by an explosive gives them the control to send multiple jets with precise spacing down the same path, so the second jet arrives after the first triggered the explosive and the shock wave has propagated away and thus doesn't get disrupted. (And potentially more than two jets: One more than layers of armor/explosive.)
The other stated advantage is that the energy of the explosive can be used more efficiently than forming jets by direct action of the explosive pressure wave. More jet(s) for less bang. Then you can tune that to go for more powerful and/or lighter warhead designs.
Another example of the adage: In a war between armor and weapons, weapons eventually win. Bye-bye reactive armor.
It will be available to OEMs and enterprise customers on April 29.... The company will wait till "early summer" to enable SP3 downloads through Automatic Updates.
I think the FTC should get involved and determine what the definition of "Internet Access" and "ISP" are.
I agree that the issue is a proper job for the FTC, not the FCC.
Network neutrality can mean "Treat all packets the same." Or it can mean "Don't favor one player's packets over anothers'."
There are valid, pro-consumer reasons to give some packets different treatment than others. One of the biggest: Streams and file transfers have very different requirements for good service. Optimizing routing for one of them makes the performance of the other very bad when things get congested -(and file transfers WILL congest a network unless they're throttled to the point that the network is seriously underutilized.)
So the real issues of "Network Neutrality" is anticompetitive and rent-seeking ("consumer gouging") behaviors and sabotaging high-bandwidth applications to protect an underprovisioned network from obvious failure (thus failing to provide the advertised service). Anticompetitive actions, abuse of defacto monopolies, and false advertising are FTC issues.
Thanks for pointing out the link. It gives MOST of what I want. (I see it's got lots of nice ports but requires an external modem, which also must be hardened, low power, temperature capable, etc.)
Unfortunately, I'm still in the dark about one very important thing:
They give lots of info on the range of acceptable power INPUT TO THE INCLUDED WALL WART. However they give no such info on the 12V input to the device itself. Is the external supply handling the stabilization of that broad range of power input or is that a capability of the device itself.
Is it suitable, for instance, for hooking directly to a 12V renewable energy system or plugging directly into an automotive power supply? That means operates and is undamaged by sustained voltages between 11.75 and 14.5V, with transients far above and below that. (Protection against accidental polarity reversal and auto-shutdown if voltage has a sustained drop below 11.75V to prevent damage to batteries are also a good idea. "Sustained" in the low voltage case means tens of seconds: You don't want it to go belly-up when an engine is cranked.)
Ok, so it's wide temperature range, low power, and low cost. How about some more detail?
- Actual power consumption. (How does it vary with load and temperature? What voltage (range) is required?)
- Price.
- Processor speed.
- Internal memory. (Disk? Flash? How much RAM?,...)
- I/O ports. (How many? What are they?)
Seriously, the one thing we can agree on is that there is often confusion regarding whether someone meant "1000" or "1024" when they used a prefix.
Yeah.
I still remember the two-core-box IBM 7094 I once worked on. It had a mode switch to enable the memory extension or disable it for compatibility with old code. The label read "32k" versus "65k". B-b
The referenced article claims that "the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power", which is bogus.
The English had a major sea trading infrastructure, at a time when improvements in clocks finally made accurate determination of longitude by celestial navigation practical for trans-Atlantic voyages.
They established an observatory at a major port (Grenwich) to provide a time-hack for ships in port (both military and commercial) to set their clocks, and distributed navigational charts with that observatory's latitude as the basis for the coordinate system (thus simplifying navigational calculations).
This quickly became the defacto standard on a voluntary basis among commercial shipping, along with the cities that grew up around major seaports (with multiples-of-an-hour offsets to approximate local noon - typically multiples of an hour, sometimes of a half- or quarter-hour), just as the coordinate system became the standard for shoreline mapping in other locations (to simplify navigation near shores by ships using the Grenwich meridian for their ocean charts). Then when railroads drove time standardization it spread from the seaport cities to inland locations.
Of course the empire's military and government used it internally. But the rest of the world adopted it voluntarily.
It wasn't about confusing spies, but rather adhering to treaty obligations [limiting number of bombers].... a fighter can carry a bomb. [Being a bomber] is defined by characteristics such as range, size, payload, etc. Of course, such a careful play on the rules would be lost if you just went and called the thing a bomber.
Good point.
(But I thought the designation "fighter-bomber", designating a small, fast plane that had significant bombing capability without meeting the treaty definition of strategic bomber, was already in use for some only-details-secret US aircraft.)
The irony on the political side is it works better when you keep your own guys willing to die for their country while convincing the other guys not to.
I don't see that as particularly ironic. Just another example of the way things tend to get inverted when dealing with the use or threat of force - the "economy of negative value".
To deter or defeat aggressors - whether schoolyard bullies, criminals, or political aggressors - you need to be willing to RISK lives. But the goal is to attain some purpose, not to die. (When you must die, you try to sell your life as dearly as possible. But it's still better to accomplish the objective AND be alive to accomplish another.)
Making "dying in battle" a goal (rather than an unfortunate mishap) leads to poor strategy. While it does make it harder to turn the fighter away from his attack, it makes him prone to trade his life away cheaply. He'll go after low-value high-risk targets rather than picking off a low-risk target and getting away or attacking something of high value with a high risk of interception and incarceration. (You see a lot of this in the Middle East.)
In a conflict between weapons and armor, weapons eventually win.
What is going on in "computer security" now is a conflict where the bad guys use weapons and the good guys only use armor.
Just as with ordinary security - safes, locked doors, walls, armor, military "defense", etc. - attempts at IT infrastructure security only slow, not stop, the perpetrators. In ordinary security the "war" must be taken to the enemy - with self-defense deterrence and counterattacks, arrest/trial/incarceration, or retaliatory war. Why should information security be any different?
But as of now there is essentially no consequence - except occasional failure and the need to adjust tools to evade the latest security tweaks. The result has been an opportunity, and financial incentive, to develop a powerful security-breaking infrastructure and several very lucrative businesses based on it.
So things will keep getting worse until there is retaliation that creates enough consequences to knock the perpetrators down in number of perpetrators and longevity of activity.
Retaliation produces collateral damage, so this won't be pleasant. But systematically letting bad guys get away with their crimes creates a rising exponential of wrongdoing that eventually sucks the lifeblood out of the rest of the population. Eventually this will become so egregious that the rest of the population will be willing to accept the collateral damage if it knocks down the problem.
why are they called "stealth fighters"? They're actually a tactical bomber,...
When the Continental Congress put together the country's very first army, they named it the "Second Army".
The military is about hurting people and breaking things until the other side knuckles under. As Patton pointed out this works better if few of your own guys die for their country while getting the other poor saps to die for their own. A good military operation grabs every opportunity to improve their odds, both of success and survival.
If calling a bomber a fighter both confuses the spys and gets the best pilots to enjoy flying its exceptionally high-value missions (with support and sensor technology limited to preserve stealth), why not do it?
FOX News is a right-wing puppet news organization.
FOX News is a neoconservative puppet news organization. (This became glaringly obvious during their covarage of the Republican primaries.)
There are several other factions on the "right wing" - some, IMHO, much more reasonable. (Classical conservatives, minarchist-capitalist libertarians, and the religious right, to name three big ones. Of varying reasonableness. B-) )
The neoconservatives are essentially retreaded Stalanists, some of whom are former Democrats who moved to the Republican party after the Rs took control of the congress. To the extent there is a faction on the right that is all the bad things the left wing has been saying the right wing is, that's them.
If they've been accepting orders (and credit card numbers) for a product that doesn't exist -- isn't that called fraud?
Only if they can't create and deliver it within 30(?) days and don't contact the people who ordered it within that time, notifying them of the delay and refunding the money of those who don't consent to the extension.
Back in the early days of home computing a number of companies started up by selling vaporware, collecting the money, and using it to fund the development. (I don't recall if Apple was one of the companies that started up that way. But Woz and Jobs were pretty hard up for cash back at the start.)
The FTC tightened up after some con men calling themselves "World Memory Systems" took a picture of a few chips sitting on an unstuffed PC board, ran an ad claiming it was a new peripheral board providing four serial and one parallel port for Altair/Imsai home computers (with a name, 4S+P, similar to another popular product, 4P+S), and pulled a major fraud.
A pirate cannot sit in one country and commit his deeds in another country, far away from his physical location.
The three mile limit was created because that was essentially the maximum range of cannon at the time: A shore battery could only hit something within that range, so that's how far the countries could claim their territory extended.
The cannon on pirate craft had an only slightly lesser range. A pirate, raiding a town, could bombard it from a couple miles out.
Modern alalogical "pirates", shouting an analogical "stand and deliver" as they extort valuables from their victims, just have analogical cannon with MUCH longer ranges. B-)
When will this zombie...er, urban legend die (at least in the US?)
Cable Internet Service Not Common Carrier... and that was a ruling by the US Supreme Court. Corollary: FCC Reclassifies DSL, Drops Common Carrier Rules... so DSLs don't escape either.
IMHO the Slashdot titles are mistaken. The decision doesn't say they're not a common carrier. It just clarifies what type of common carrier they are.
So they don't have to provide wholesale access to their lines? Fine. Do/can they refuse to give their competitors a retail subscription? (Say: Covad opens an office somewhere they don't have their own net deployed and orders cable internet for it from Comcast. Does Comcast refuse to install it?) If not, they're still a common carrier.
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of thing seems like it could lead to rampant abuse, or at least error if someone winds up on one of these lists that shouldn't be on it.
Yep. And they got the color wrong, too.
This is not a "red flag". It's a government-maintained "blacklist":
- It creates a broad penalty for anyone they put on the list, making it virtually impossible for them to get or hold a well-paying job, buy a house, buy a car, or do most of the other big-ticket business of life.
- Putting people on it is done in secret and without legal due process, for reasons other than imposing statutory penalties for conviction of violating a published law. No opportunity to confront witnesses against them or challenge the process - either as they're being added or to remove themselves afterward.
- The list is effectively secret. It's known to the business people but is virtually unknown to the people on it, who get no notification that they've on it or even that it exists.
Welcome to the McCarthy Era, version 2.0.
I find it also fascinating that if you presented this in non-internet terms, the citizens would be up in arms.
Here's another example that might be more obvious to the ordinary citizen:
"There are places where criminal voice communication is centralized: the telephone switches located in central offices across the country. All of the telephone network's activity, legal and illegal, flows through these 'choke points,' and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off the signals. What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the content of all the telephone calls, which are already being siphoned off by the NSA, in order to look for illegal activity."
The descriptions of "the error-detecting hat" look like the intent is to train the brain to stay alert and not make errors - or to refocus it when it wanders. (DING DING DING! HEY! WAKE UP! PAY ATTENTION!) The hat may be useful, but that use of the feedback may be the wrong approach.
The signature they're describing corresponds, not just to a lack of alertness, but specifically a lack of alertness because the brain is going into a resting state. Seems to me that might be because all this decision-making has made the working regions of the brain tired and the brain is trying to clear them out so they'll operate properly again. So the problem is not the lack of alertness, but the attempt to continue to make decisions during the resting cycle.
Given that, a better use of the feedback might be to tell the wearer that it's time to stop making important decisions and take a break, rather than trying to overuse a "mental muscle" that's exhausted - and perhaps train him to recognize the mental state himself so he can then dispense with the hat.
The "break times" in working days were set up when studies showed that taking breaks, despite the "work time lost", resulted in more and better work in the work time remaining. This looks like a way to optimize the process, rather than running breaks on a clock.
This is not a dupe. (At least not of the previous one you linked.)
The old article you linked is about detecting a signature corresponding to an early stage of decision making. This one is about detecting a signature of the brain going into a resting / attention wandering state that causes decisions to be error-prone.
If you are a carrier in telephony, you should have many load-balanced servers that can be taken offline one at a time and restored after patching.
Servers be damned.
If you are a carrier in telephony, virtually all your subscribers have a connection consisting of a single line terminated by a singe box at the edge of your network (sometimes a series string of single-boxes each doing different parts of the job.) When anything makes that box unavailable, even for moments, all the customers whose sole connection is through it are down. That might be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of them.
Such boxes are designed for "six-nines" uptime targets. Redundant power supplies, redundant control processors, redundant interconnects between cards, redundant uplinks, redundant FANS, backplanes with no active components, software designed with separately replacable and restartable modules, etc.
And yes they DO run for years without a reboot. (In fact even servers do. For instance: The servers at the baby bells that record the billing records generated at the connect, answer, and end of a call. Some of those have been up for years - with minor patches queued for the next time some mishap makes them reboot.)
You invoked Godwin's Law, and lose.
Misstatements of Godwin's Law are very convenient for neo-NAZIs.
Never Again!
... many sci-fi writers who seem to "predict" what technology will come to pass are really just up on current blue-sky research.
And sometimes they're the ones that DO the blue-sky research. (Examples: Clarke's work on the instrument landing system - which he later fictionalized as _Glide Path_. Ian Fleming and Eric Frank Russel being two of the brain trust in the WWII British "department of dirty tricks" - again later recycled into a number of stories by each.)
And sometimes they're the ones that inspire the research or design. (Example: The clamshell communicator in Star Trek - inspiring Motorola's Star Tak cellphone.)
And a big part of the point of this new MAHEM technology seems to be defeating reactive armor.
Reactive armor uses a small explosive on the outer layer, triggered by the incoming jet of metal, to defocus the jet before it penetrates the inner layer. Using electric currents and magnetic fields generated mostly by an explosive gives them the control to send multiple jets with precise spacing down the same path, so the second jet arrives after the first triggered the explosive and the shock wave has propagated away and thus doesn't get disrupted. (And potentially more than two jets: One more than layers of armor/explosive.)
The other stated advantage is that the energy of the explosive can be used more efficiently than forming jets by direct action of the explosive pressure wave. More jet(s) for less bang. Then you can tune that to go for more powerful and/or lighter warhead designs.
Another example of the adage: In a war between armor and weapons, weapons eventually win. Bye-bye reactive armor.
It will be available to OEMs and enterprise customers on April 29. ... The company will wait till "early summer" to enable SP3 downloads through Automatic Updates.
So the bad guys, who can automatically generate exploits from updates in minutes will have MONTHS to generate and deploy their malware.
Good job, Microsoft!
I think the FTC should get involved and determine what the definition of "Internet Access" and "ISP" are.
I agree that the issue is a proper job for the FTC, not the FCC.
Network neutrality can mean "Treat all packets the same." Or it can mean "Don't favor one player's packets over anothers'."
There are valid, pro-consumer reasons to give some packets different treatment than others. One of the biggest: Streams and file transfers have very different requirements for good service. Optimizing routing for one of them makes the performance of the other very bad when things get congested -(and file transfers WILL congest a network unless they're throttled to the point that the network is seriously underutilized.)
So the real issues of "Network Neutrality" is anticompetitive and rent-seeking ("consumer gouging") behaviors and sabotaging high-bandwidth applications to protect an underprovisioned network from obvious failure (thus failing to provide the advertised service). Anticompetitive actions, abuse of defacto monopolies, and false advertising are FTC issues.
Thanks for pointing out the link. It gives MOST of what I want.
(I see it's got lots of nice ports but requires an external modem,
which also must be hardened, low power, temperature capable, etc.)
Unfortunately, I'm still in the dark about one very important thing:
They give lots of info on the range of acceptable power INPUT TO THE INCLUDED WALL WART. However they give no such info on the 12V input to the device itself. Is the external supply handling the stabilization of that broad range of power input or is that a capability of the device itself.
Is it suitable, for instance, for hooking directly to a 12V renewable energy system or plugging directly into an automotive power supply? That means operates and is undamaged by sustained voltages between 11.75 and 14.5V, with transients far above and below that. (Protection against accidental polarity reversal and auto-shutdown if voltage has a sustained drop below 11.75V to prevent damage to batteries are also a good idea. "Sustained" in the low voltage case means tens of seconds: You don't want it to go belly-up when an engine is cranked.)
Ok, so it's wide temperature range, low power, and low cost. How about some more detail?
...)
- Actual power consumption. (How does it vary with load and temperature? What voltage (range) is required?)
- Price.
- Processor speed.
- Internal memory. (Disk? Flash? How much RAM?,
- I/O ports. (How many? What are they?)
Etc.
TFA was fluff.
Seriously, the one thing we can agree on is that there is often confusion regarding whether someone meant "1000" or "1024" when they used a prefix.
Yeah.
I still remember the two-core-box IBM 7094 I once worked on. It had a mode switch to enable the memory extension or disable it for compatibility with old code. The label read "32k" versus "65k". B-b
The referenced article claims that "the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power", which is bogus.
The English had a major sea trading infrastructure, at a time when improvements in clocks finally made accurate determination of longitude by celestial navigation practical for trans-Atlantic voyages.
They established an observatory at a major port (Grenwich) to provide a time-hack for ships in port (both military and commercial) to set their clocks, and distributed navigational charts with that observatory's latitude as the basis for the coordinate system (thus simplifying navigational calculations).
This quickly became the defacto standard on a voluntary basis among commercial shipping, along with the cities that grew up around major seaports (with multiples-of-an-hour offsets to approximate local noon - typically multiples of an hour, sometimes of a half- or quarter-hour), just as the coordinate system became the standard for shoreline mapping in other locations (to simplify navigation near shores by ships using the Grenwich meridian for their ocean charts). Then when railroads drove time standardization it spread from the seaport cities to inland locations.
Of course the empire's military and government used it internally. But the rest of the world adopted it voluntarily.
It wasn't about confusing spies, but rather adhering to treaty obligations [limiting number of bombers]. ... a fighter can carry a bomb. [Being a bomber] is defined by characteristics such as range, size, payload, etc. Of course, such a careful play on the rules would be lost if you just went and called the thing a bomber.
Good point.
(But I thought the designation "fighter-bomber", designating a small, fast plane that had significant bombing capability without meeting the treaty definition of strategic bomber, was already in use for some only-details-secret US aircraft.)
The irony on the political side is it works better when you keep your own guys willing to die for their country while convincing the other guys not to.
I don't see that as particularly ironic. Just another example of the way things tend to get inverted when dealing with the use or threat of force - the "economy of negative value".
To deter or defeat aggressors - whether schoolyard bullies, criminals, or political aggressors - you need to be willing to RISK lives. But the goal is to attain some purpose, not to die. (When you must die, you try to sell your life as dearly as possible. But it's still better to accomplish the objective AND be alive to accomplish another.)
Making "dying in battle" a goal (rather than an unfortunate mishap) leads to poor strategy. While it does make it harder to turn the fighter away from his attack, it makes him prone to trade his life away cheaply. He'll go after low-value high-risk targets rather than picking off a low-risk target and getting away or attacking something of high value with a high risk of interception and incarceration. (You see a lot of this in the Middle East.)
In a conflict between weapons and armor, weapons eventually win.
What is going on in "computer security" now is a conflict where the bad guys use weapons and the good guys only use armor.
Just as with ordinary security - safes, locked doors, walls, armor, military "defense", etc. - attempts at IT infrastructure security only slow, not stop, the perpetrators. In ordinary security the "war" must be taken to the enemy - with self-defense deterrence and counterattacks, arrest/trial/incarceration, or retaliatory war. Why should information security be any different?
But as of now there is essentially no consequence - except occasional failure and the need to adjust tools to evade the latest security tweaks. The result has been an opportunity, and financial incentive, to develop a powerful security-breaking infrastructure and several very lucrative businesses based on it.
So things will keep getting worse until there is retaliation that creates enough consequences to knock the perpetrators down in number of perpetrators and longevity of activity.
Retaliation produces collateral damage, so this won't be pleasant. But systematically letting bad guys get away with their crimes creates a rising exponential of wrongdoing that eventually sucks the lifeblood out of the rest of the population. Eventually this will become so egregious that the rest of the population will be willing to accept the collateral damage if it knocks down the problem.
why are they called "stealth fighters"? They're actually a tactical bomber, ...
When the Continental Congress put together the country's very first army, they named it the "Second Army".
The military is about hurting people and breaking things until the other side knuckles under. As Patton pointed out this works better if few of your own guys die for their country while getting the other poor saps to die for their own. A good military operation grabs every opportunity to improve their odds, both of success and survival.
If calling a bomber a fighter both confuses the spys and gets the best pilots to enjoy flying its exceptionally high-value missions (with support and sensor technology limited to preserve stealth), why not do it?
FOX News is a right-wing puppet news organization.
FOX News is a neoconservative puppet news organization. (This became glaringly obvious during their covarage of the Republican primaries.)
There are several other factions on the "right wing" - some, IMHO, much more reasonable. (Classical conservatives, minarchist-capitalist libertarians, and the religious right, to name three big ones. Of varying reasonableness. B-) )
The neoconservatives are essentially retreaded Stalanists, some of whom are former Democrats who moved to the Republican party after the Rs took control of the congress. To the extent there is a faction on the right that is all the bad things the left wing has been saying the right wing is, that's them.
Thanks for the correction and the link.
The ad was a full-page in an early issue of Byte magazine. That's all I recall at the moment.
If they've been accepting orders (and credit card numbers) for a product that doesn't exist -- isn't that called fraud?
Only if they can't create and deliver it within 30(?) days and don't contact the people who ordered it within that time, notifying them of the delay and refunding the money of those who don't consent to the extension.
Back in the early days of home computing a number of companies started up by selling vaporware, collecting the money, and using it to fund the development. (I don't recall if Apple was one of the companies that started up that way. But Woz and Jobs were pretty hard up for cash back at the start.)
The FTC tightened up after some con men calling themselves "World Memory Systems" took a picture of a few chips sitting on an unstuffed PC board, ran an ad claiming it was a new peripheral board providing four serial and one parallel port for Altair/Imsai home computers (with a name, 4S+P, similar to another popular product, 4P+S), and pulled a major fraud.
I hope this doesn't catch on and become the primary distribution model.
I hope it DOES catch on - for a while.
It will give consumers a financial incentive to switch to FOSS - every time a bill comes due. B-)
A pirate cannot sit in one country and commit his deeds in another country, far away from his physical location.
The three mile limit was created because that was essentially the maximum range of cannon at the time: A shore battery could only hit something within that range, so that's how far the countries could claim their territory extended.
The cannon on pirate craft had an only slightly lesser range. A pirate, raiding a town, could bombard it from a couple miles out.
Modern alalogical "pirates", shouting an analogical "stand and deliver" as they extort valuables from their victims, just have analogical cannon with MUCH longer ranges. B-)
When will this zombie...er, urban legend die (at least in the US?)
... and that was a ruling by the US Supreme Court. ... so DSLs don't escape either.
Cable Internet Service Not Common Carrier
Corollary:
FCC Reclassifies DSL, Drops Common Carrier Rules
IMHO the Slashdot titles are mistaken. The decision doesn't say they're not a common carrier. It just clarifies what type of common carrier they are.
So they don't have to provide wholesale access to their lines? Fine. Do/can they refuse to give their competitors a retail subscription? (Say: Covad opens an office somewhere they don't have their own net deployed and orders cable internet for it from Comcast. Does Comcast refuse to install it?) If not, they're still a common carrier.