... the ancillary effect of the incandescent -- namely, heat.
They're also used as an inexpensive heating element for things like battery houses and pump houses (to keep the tanks and pipes from freezing and the batteries at a temperature where they operate efficiently) in rural areas with cold climates. A 60 watt bulb on a thermostat will keep an insulated pumphouse above freezing in subzero weather. (Of course you use more than one for when they burn out...)
More roadblocks for people trying alternative energy in areas where it makes economic sense.
1) The teeth were regrown using cells harvested from tooth buds - in other words, cells that were already programmed to make teeth, in the stage corresponding to the structure they intended to implant.
What's the improvement on just transplanting the tooth buds?
- Can they make MORE teeth than the number of harvested buds? (That's good if true.)
- Proving that they can grow teeth in an adult animal? (That's good, if true.)
But it doesn't look like any magic yet.
2) The finger tip in question was cut off just beyond the start of the nail bed.
I used to work for a fellow who had lost a finger just beyond the end of the nail bed. It grew back without any pig bladder extract. A little stubby, but a full, functional finger - nail fingerprint, feeling, and all.
He said the doctors told him that finger tips generally grow back just fine unless they are cut so far back that none of the nail bed is left.
Perhaps there's something to the pig bladder extract - say, in the military research on fingers cut off farther back. But this particular example doesn't show anything new that can't be done without it.
I find it interesting that Google, spawned in California (one of the most anti-gun-owner places in the USA), is expanding in another of them: New York City, home of the Sullivan Act.
On the "Red State / Blue State" scale, they're both deepest blue - which means they're doing the same on a lot of other issues.
About half the population, and about half the technical talent and genius-level personnel, are members of "Blue State" cultures, and unwilling to move to places where their rights would be as thoroughly curtailed as those where Google has chosen to operate.
So Google's choice of siting is cutting in half their pool of talented potential recruits.
"Shooting themselves in the foot", so to speak.
But by all means let them make such choices. It leaves a pool of talent available for potential competitors who don't have the same political and social baises - or blindness.
(I wait with bated breath for some "Red" state with a good university and decent gun and tax laws to clone the provision of California law that prevents employers from claiming their employees' inventions if they aren't in a business where they apply. Then we might just see another "silicon valley" phenomenon, Red State style.)
Eliminate all patents on software and business methods.
Barring that: Consider "doing X with a computer" - where doing X without a computer is a well-known process and the computerization is a straghtforward analog - to automatically be "obvious to a practitioner of the art", and unpatentable in it own right. (If "doing X without a computer" is patented, of course, "doing X on a computer" would similarly be "doing X" and
Software doesn't need patent protection.
- Copyright (even absent the crazy extensions in the last few decades) is adequate to avoid direct copying.
- The the time needed for the competition to recognize a profitable product, reverse-engineer it, write a replacement, and bring it to marketability is adequate to let innovators recover their investment plus profit and establish themselves in the market niche they create.
Most "business methods" have similar characteristics regarding payback of development costs. Further: Patenting them is so fundamentally anti-competitive that it makes no economic sense.
Keep patents restricted to things like physical inventions, manufacturing processes, drugs, and the like, which do have a big development cost that needs a significant time to recover.
So how do you get 12 volt, 5 volt, 3.3 volt, and 1.5 volt DC from that?
High-efficiency switching regulators on the blades. (They're actually getting so good that you have less heat loss by putting a local switcher near a power-hungry chip than by bringing its high current in at its low voltages through the PC-board power planes.)
Getting the raw AC->DC conversion out of the way outside the air-conditioned environment saves you a bunch of heat load, as does distributing at a relatively high voltage (such as "relay-rack" standard 48VDC) to reduce I-squared-R losses. And switchers are more efficient with higher raw DC supplies, so going to 48V (about the highest you can while avoiding touch-it-and-die shock hazard - which is why Bell standardized on it) is much better than 12 or 24.
A bunch of our cisco gear has a plug for backup power, and we had some DEC equipment years back that did, but they were different plugs and different voltages. If it were standardized, life would be good.
So switch to Redback gear. It can all be powered by telco-standard 48VDC supplies. B-)
The positive feedback loop is a big part of it. It produces a pool of trained people from whom you can hire the skills you need on short notice and without paying relocation expenses and "moving away from where the action is" penalties.
But another factor is a small but very important piece of IP law in California:
If an employee makes an invention, on his own time, without using company materials or resources, and it's not in the company's immediate or likely future business path, it belongs to the employee. No matter what the employment contract says. (The contracts generally explicitly include one page which IS this provision.)
The result is that people who invented something that their company wouldn't be developing could rent the building across the street and build their own startup to develop and market it. And many of them did - and did it again a couple years later - repeat for decades.
The result is that startups budded off and grew like a yeast culture.
Any other state that wants to build its own version of Silicon Valley needs to clone this provision into their own state law.
If this is done, and they can provide an alternaive to California's high crime, high tax, and oppressive political-correctness, they might see an even bigger boom in one of their major university towns.
"for all the logic and deductive reasoning they use, it ends up being pure chance and blind luck that gives us some of the best discoveries."...You make it sound like the researcher was walking down the street one day with a dish of cancer and somebody bumped into her with the right chemicals....
The decades of previous work, including her education and work experience, worked steadily towards her being a cancer researcher who was following a logical chain that brought cancer cells and compound together for the discovery.
But sometimes you DO have a "blind luck" event - which someone with the right education can recognize and develop.
An example (which I heard from Emmett Leith, one of the inventors of practical holography) was the discovery (not invention) of the neodymium/glass laser.
Laser researcher (in the "rod of synthetic ruby" days) was home for vacation and took a flash picture using a strobe-light flash on a camera. He happened to notice a red blink from an ashtray. So he fired the flash at it:
Flash... Blink!
Flash... Blink!
Flash... Blink!
Asking for and receiving the oddball ashtray, he took it in to the lab, along with the flash camera, called everybody together, and ran the demo:
Flash... Blink!
After everybody else had seen and confirmed the phenomenon they smashed the glass and spectroanalyzed the fragments, discovering the neodymium impurity (which had provided the gain - interacting with the total internal reflection of the ashtray surfaces which provided the resonant cavity).
Then they were successful at making lasers out of rods of neodymium-doped glass - much cheaper than synthetic ruby.
Heard a variant of that from a teaching fellow. In that version it wasn't quite so straightforward:
F4C2 is horribly toxic. They had a big tank of this compressed gas and had set up the wall of glassware (with great care) for some experiment. They hooked it up, opened the valve, and nothing came out. (Yet the weight, as above, indicated that the tank WAS still full.)
The concern was that the valve was clogged, and that the tank still contained the poisonous gas under high pressure. So any attempt to open it - or even closely examine the valve - could lead to the sudden release of the gas and the death of all in the room and many in the building. Yet how could they dispose of it? And what HAD happened, anyhow?
(This was like a blown fuse in an electrical lab: The initial trouble is just a symptom of something underlying, which needs to be investigated, if only to prevent a recurrence.)
Eventually, after much deliberation, one of the experimenters took his life in his hands and cut open the tank, discovering the white powder.
They immediately realized it had polymerized (probably due to a contaminant) and were hot on the trail of a new and very interestin/useful plastic - starting with a large sample which told them what useful properties it would have and knowing exactly what the monomer in question was.
= = = =
Discovery of nylon was a similar accident: A solution was left on a window sill and turned cloudy when exposed to light. Fortunately the chemist decided to examine it to figure out what had happened rather than just dumping it - and thus were born synthetic fabrics.
Unfortunately it takes more expensive peripheral equipment and/or more software to make it happen, at both your end and your VoIP provider's VoIP/POTS bridge. (Your VoIP dongle/software needs to be a smartmodem, not just an A/D converter, for starters. But the POTS bridge equipment is probably a bigger cost boost for the ISP. Your provider is stuck in cutthroat competition with other providers and doesn't need to quadruple the price of his equipment to handle something that only occurs rarely and wasn't part of the deal.)
So most VoIP services don't handle it. (Let alone figuring out how to automagically recognize a FAX call and switch modes in mid-call.)
There is a lot of signal degradation converting from analog to digital, lossy compression of the digital signal, and converting it back to analog. Not to mention the analog to digital conversion has to happen twice (once over the VoIP carrier, and again when it's received).
It's not just that.
POTS signals are generally converted to digital samples at the first switching center they hit (or at curbside equipment along the way), switched as a digital signal, and converted to analog again similarly near the far end. To avoid clicks and pops (and persistent phase jumps) the sampling rates at the D->A and A->D conversion must match - exactly. The phone companies use very accurate clocks, synchronized across their whole network, to make this happen.
The phone companies originally used digital just to pack multiple phone calls for a hop from one analog switching center to another - and D->A->switch->A->D converted at each switch - with synchronization only needed between the ends of the hop. This saved a lot on cabling and gave better signal than analog transport, but not as good as digital from one "last mile" to the other. Then they added digital switching to eliminate the degradation of the multiple A/D conversions and simplify the switch - and spent a decade or more getting clocking synchronized across the whole network to eliminate the resulting glitches. Even today, in the being-retired POTS network, "timing is a third of the problem".
(These days the clocks are synchronized even between carriers by essentially all of them getting their master clocking from the atomic clocks of the GPS system. Before that they used things like LORAN D - a pre-satellite clocking-based radio navigation system for ships - or generated them in their own committee of atomic clocks and distributed the clocking along with the signals using the carriers of the SONET optical fibers or the T1 and E1 carriers of copper and microwave days, and these methods are still used to synchronize boxes that aren't in installations big enough to rate their own satellite-derived clock.)
The signal is encoded as a "DS0" stream of 8,000 8-bit samples per second, in one of two closely related floating-point-like coding schemes ("A-law" or "u-law" where "u" is "mu"), depending on whether you're using European or American-style standards.
So the signal is only capable of carrying 64,000 bits per second. (In fact the LSB may be "stolen" every few samples for ringing, off-hook, and dialing information, so only 56,000 bps are reliable - and it's actually a bit lower since some code sequences are forbidden by a regulation.)
Modern modems are designed around this and try to use as much as possible of these bits for data. In typical ISP-type modem banks the ISP end is connected to the phone company by a digital link and can directly control the bits, without incuring an A->D penalty, so the downlink can approach 56k, with the modem figuring out the actual sampling boundaries as part of the decoding. The uplink (or both sides in communication between two modems on analog POTS lines) comes pretty close to it - though it has to sacrifice some bandwidth to use a coding scheme that can survive clocking-rate errors between the modem's transmitter and the digitizer.
Of course if your VoIP link uses compression to carry your signal in less than 64k bps of payload, you're totally hosed. (And many of them do. For starters, if you're working over a dialup line you don't HAVE 64k bps to use.) Your modem assumes it's working over the POTS network and tries to use the bandwidth. And its signal gets totally hashed by the compression.
But even if you have the bandwidth (or the modem figures out that it's got a "noisy link" and down-speeds), you're still hosed. Because the clocking used for VoIP A->D and D->A steps is just not stable enough for the modem to take advantage of the bandwidth in the digital link.
One of the big pieces of persistent fallout from the war between
Which should qualify as a theft of a trade secret.
I can see where identity theft can be broken down... since the victim is not denied use of their identity.
In the case of theft of trade secret the criminal deprives the victim of the information's secrecy.
But I agree that both terms, though recognized, are misnomers. Like "piracy" being used for illegal copying of entertainment, rather than theft of ships and cargo on the open ocean, generally with the murder of the crew and any passengers in an effort by the pirates to avoid identification and capture.
But this seems like splitting hairs in support of file sharing.
Using language properly, rather than letting the words drift into uselessness, is just such "splitting" of "hairs".
But I agree that hair-splitting is going on here.
As for supporting file sharing (by which I presume you mean "file sharing without the permission of the owner of the file's content" - another hair splitting in the interests of clarity), as you'll notice from my other postings in this discussion I don't support such copyright violation. I was just attempting to clarify a previous poster's meaning, in the face of confusion by followup posters.
Imagine a bunch of cars that accelerate from zero to sixty in 250 feet, then slam into a barrier, causing a multi-car pileup from which, starting just one inch further down the road, one of them rockets out at 85 miles per hour.
(Obviously they were inspired by the traffic on Interstate 280 on their way to SLAC. B-) )
The episodes were probably rips of the season premiere DVD that leaked before it aired (and were probably already on bit torrent and the newsgroups long before they were uploaded to YouTube). Why isn't FOX trying to go after the original hole on their end with this much effort?
If that's so:
- They still have to go after the actual posters. Publishing it widely is far more of an issue than merely getting hold of a copy and watching it or showing it to a few friends.
- Going after the poster may be part of chasing down the leak.
(Some watch the posting and skip the air show. Others are aware it's available and skip the air show, confident that they can pick up what they missed from the net.)
Still others watch the feed AND the air show - but watch the air show with less attention since they've already seen it before. Less commercials get watched (as they take less care to be back in front of the screen before the show restarts after a break), and those that are watched are watched with less excitement/attention (since the show raises less adrenaline when the surprises and plot twists are already known). This also reduces the value of the commercial slots to the sponsors, which may again map back to less money for the network and studio.
So why is it a problem to provide a copy of something that was already given away for free?
Two reasons:
- Shows like The Simpsons are payment to people like you for renting your eyeball time, to be sold to the sponsors. This is what pays for their creation and distribution. Showing it to you without the content owner's consent deprives the content owner of part of the value of his content.
- The first run of an ongoing cliffhanger-serial derives additional value from being a scarce resource - making it a bigger eyeball-draw. People actually go out of their way to avoid missing an episode, raising the ratings significantly. The commercials can be priced accordingly. Posting the episode in advance of the first showing reduces the legitimate showing to a rerun. (Some watch the posting and skip the air show. Others are aware it's available and skip the air show, confident that they can pick up what they missed from the net.) That kills the additional draw, reducing the audience, the ratings, and thus the money paid by the sponsors.
For something like "24" that's potentially a LOT of lost bucks.
... and how do you know that the person in question did not actually steal physical data carriers with data on them?
If he did, that would be "theft" - but of the data carrier. That might be an included crime - as bank robbery may include assault, battery, false imprisonment, and a host of other crimes that are secondary to the WAY the robbery was committed. But "data carriers" are cheap: Such an included crime would no doubt be petty rather than grand - a very minor element compared to the major issue.
That issue was the improper obtaining and publishing of the CONTENT of the data carrier, which is not "theft", but a crime of another name.
What he's getting at is the definition of "theft".
Theft has two elements:
- The bad guy gains the McGuffin.
- The owner loses the McGuffin. He doesn't have it any more.
There are other crimes where the bad guy improperly obtains something without the owner losing it. They are not "theft", because depriving the owner of his property has not occurred.
(Depriving the owner of much or all of the VALUE of his property may have occurred - which is typically why these non-theft crimes are similar enough to be confused with actual theft.)
Such a thing could have happened 100 years ago in Sibera (exit hole, entrance on the other side of Earth was still too small to notice).
The maximum possible energy available to such an "exit event"...
Of course this doesn't eliminate the possibility of the event being the exit wound from a black hole of non-trivial mass arriving from space. But IMHO the ones that might be made in an accelerator or from a cosmic ray collision are too light to qualify.
There is a difference since the cosmic ray collision would create a moving black hole that escapes fast enough before it gets too big.
Granted such collisions create moving black holes.
But the bulk of them would be aimed at the earth. If they have a significant cross-section for absorbing matter they eat enough to be slowed down below orbital velocity before they exit.
Such a thing could have happened 100 years ago in Sibera (exit hole, entrance on the other side of Earth was still too small to notice).
The maximum possible energy available to such an "exit event" would be the mass-energy equivalent of the cosmic ray, the nucleus it hit to form the black hole, and the nuclei they ate on their way through WITHOUT being slowed below surface-level orbital velocity.
The Tunguska event was estimated at 10 to 20 Megatons. That's equivalent to the total conversion of 1 to 2 POUNDS of matter to energy.
Given that Avogadro's number is about 6e23, I think it's just a TAD too big to be the result of a black hole with the mass of a couple nuclei at even cosmic ray velocity chewing their way through the planet on a diet that doesn't make them fall back before breaking out the far side. B-)
Slashdot Mirror
... the ancillary effect of the incandescent -- namely, heat.
They're also used as an inexpensive heating element for things like battery houses and pump houses (to keep the tanks and pipes from freezing and the batteries at a temperature where they operate efficiently) in rural areas with cold climates. A 60 watt bulb on a thermostat will keep an insulated pumphouse above freezing in subzero weather. (Of course you use more than one for when they burn out...)
More roadblocks for people trying alternative energy in areas where it makes economic sense.
Yes, but in this case it wasn't just the nail but the whole finger tip - bone, prints, and all - that grew back.
1) The teeth were regrown using cells harvested from tooth buds - in other words, cells that were already programmed to make teeth, in the stage corresponding to the structure they intended to implant.
What's the improvement on just transplanting the tooth buds?
- Can they make MORE teeth than the number of harvested buds? (That's good if true.)
- Proving that they can grow teeth in an adult animal? (That's good, if true.)
But it doesn't look like any magic yet.
2) The finger tip in question was cut off just beyond the start of the nail bed.
I used to work for a fellow who had lost a finger just beyond the end of the nail bed. It grew back without any pig bladder extract. A little stubby, but a full, functional finger - nail fingerprint, feeling, and all.
He said the doctors told him that finger tips generally grow back just fine unless they are cut so far back that none of the nail bed is left.
Perhaps there's something to the pig bladder extract - say, in the military research on fingers cut off farther back. But this particular example doesn't show anything new that can't be done without it.
... has anybody tried just asking them if they wouldn't mind merging their nuclei? It might just work.
Gosh, I hope not.
Just think what would happen if the hydrogen in the ocean water overheard and even a small percentage of them decided to go along...
I find it interesting that Google, spawned in California (one of the most anti-gun-owner places in the USA), is expanding in another of them: New York City, home of the Sullivan Act.
On the "Red State / Blue State" scale, they're both deepest blue - which means they're doing the same on a lot of other issues.
About half the population, and about half the technical talent and genius-level personnel, are members of "Blue State" cultures, and unwilling to move to places where their rights would be as thoroughly curtailed as those where Google has chosen to operate.
So Google's choice of siting is cutting in half their pool of talented potential recruits.
"Shooting themselves in the foot", so to speak.
But by all means let them make such choices. It leaves a pool of talent available for potential competitors who don't have the same political and social baises - or blindness.
(I wait with bated breath for some "Red" state with a good university and decent gun and tax laws to clone the provision of California law that prevents employers from claiming their employees' inventions if they aren't in a business where they apply. Then we might just see another "silicon valley" phenomenon, Red State style.)
Eliminate all patents on software and business methods.
Barring that: Consider "doing X with a computer" - where doing X without a computer is a well-known process and the computerization is a straghtforward analog - to automatically be "obvious to a practitioner of the art", and unpatentable in it own right. (If "doing X without a computer" is patented, of course, "doing X on a computer" would similarly be "doing X" and
Software doesn't need patent protection.
- Copyright (even absent the crazy extensions in the last few decades) is adequate to avoid direct copying.
- The the time needed for the competition to recognize a profitable product, reverse-engineer it, write a replacement, and bring it to marketability is adequate to let innovators recover their investment plus profit and establish themselves in the market niche they create.
Most "business methods" have similar characteristics regarding payback of development costs. Further: Patenting them is so fundamentally anti-competitive that it makes no economic sense.
Keep patents restricted to things like physical inventions, manufacturing processes, drugs, and the like, which do have a big development cost that needs a significant time to recover.
So how do you get 12 volt, 5 volt, 3.3 volt, and 1.5 volt DC from that?
High-efficiency switching regulators on the blades. (They're actually getting so good that you have less heat loss by putting a local switcher near a power-hungry chip than by bringing its high current in at its low voltages through the PC-board power planes.)
Getting the raw AC->DC conversion out of the way outside the air-conditioned environment saves you a bunch of heat load, as does distributing at a relatively high voltage (such as "relay-rack" standard 48VDC) to reduce I-squared-R losses. And switchers are more efficient with higher raw DC supplies, so going to 48V (about the highest you can while avoiding touch-it-and-die shock hazard - which is why Bell standardized on it) is much better than 12 or 24.
A bunch of our cisco gear has a plug for backup power, and we had some DEC equipment years back that did, but they were different plugs and different voltages. If it were standardized, life would be good.
So switch to Redback gear. It can all be powered by telco-standard 48VDC supplies. B-)
The positive feedback loop is a big part of it. It produces a pool of trained people from whom you can hire the skills you need on short notice and without paying relocation expenses and "moving away from where the action is" penalties.
But another factor is a small but very important piece of IP law in California:
If an employee makes an invention, on his own time, without using company materials or resources, and it's not in the company's immediate or likely future business path, it belongs to the employee. No matter what the employment contract says. (The contracts generally explicitly include one page which IS this provision.)
The result is that people who invented something that their company wouldn't be developing could rent the building across the street and build their own startup to develop and market it. And many of them did - and did it again a couple years later - repeat for decades.
The result is that startups budded off and grew like a yeast culture.
Any other state that wants to build its own version of Silicon Valley needs to clone this provision into their own state law.
If this is done, and they can provide an alternaive to California's high crime, high tax, and oppressive political-correctness, they might see an even bigger boom in one of their major university towns.
"for all the logic and deductive reasoning they use, it ends up being pure chance and blind luck that gives us some of the best discoveries." ...You make it sound like the researcher was walking down the street one day with a dish of cancer and somebody bumped into her with the right chemicals. ...
... Blink! ... Blink! ... Blink!
... Blink!
The decades of previous work, including her education and work experience, worked steadily towards her being a cancer researcher who was following a logical chain that brought cancer cells and compound together for the discovery.
But sometimes you DO have a "blind luck" event - which someone with the right education can recognize and develop.
An example (which I heard from Emmett Leith, one of the inventors of practical holography) was the discovery (not invention) of the neodymium/glass laser.
Laser researcher (in the "rod of synthetic ruby" days) was home for vacation and took a flash picture using a strobe-light flash on a camera. He happened to notice a red blink from an ashtray. So he fired the flash at it:
Flash
Flash
Flash
Asking for and receiving the oddball ashtray, he took it in to the lab, along with the flash camera, called everybody together, and ran the demo:
Flash
After everybody else had seen and confirmed the phenomenon they smashed the glass and spectroanalyzed the fragments, discovering the neodymium impurity (which had provided the gain - interacting with the total internal reflection of the ashtray surfaces which provided the resonant cavity).
Then they were successful at making lasers out of rods of neodymium-doped glass - much cheaper than synthetic ruby.
Heard a variant of that from a teaching fellow. In that version it wasn't quite so straightforward:
F4C2 is horribly toxic. They had a big tank of this compressed gas and had set up the wall of glassware (with great care) for some experiment. They hooked it up, opened the valve, and nothing came out. (Yet the weight, as above, indicated that the tank WAS still full.)
The concern was that the valve was clogged, and that the tank still contained the poisonous gas under high pressure. So any attempt to open it - or even closely examine the valve - could lead to the sudden release of the gas and the death of all in the room and many in the building. Yet how could they dispose of it? And what HAD happened, anyhow?
(This was like a blown fuse in an electrical lab: The initial trouble is just a symptom of something underlying, which needs to be investigated, if only to prevent a recurrence.)
Eventually, after much deliberation, one of the experimenters took his life in his hands and cut open the tank, discovering the white powder.
They immediately realized it had polymerized (probably due to a contaminant) and were hot on the trail of a new and very interestin/useful plastic - starting with a large sample which told them what useful properties it would have and knowing exactly what the monomer in question was.
= = = =
Discovery of nylon was a similar accident: A solution was left on a window sill and turned cloudy when exposed to light. Fortunately the chemist decided to examine it to figure out what had happened rather than just dumping it - and thus were born synthetic fabrics.
Unfortunately it takes more expensive peripheral equipment and/or more software to make it happen, at both your end and your VoIP provider's VoIP/POTS bridge. (Your VoIP dongle/software needs to be a smartmodem, not just an A/D converter, for starters. But the POTS bridge equipment is probably a bigger cost boost for the ISP. Your provider is stuck in cutthroat competition with other providers and doesn't need to quadruple the price of his equipment to handle something that only occurs rarely and wasn't part of the deal.)
So most VoIP services don't handle it. (Let alone figuring out how to automagically recognize a FAX call and switch modes in mid-call.)
There is a lot of signal degradation converting from analog to digital, lossy compression of the digital signal, and converting it back to analog. Not to mention the analog to digital conversion has to happen twice (once over the VoIP carrier, and again when it's received).
It's not just that.
POTS signals are generally converted to digital samples at the first switching center they hit (or at curbside equipment along the way), switched as a digital signal, and converted to analog again similarly near the far end. To avoid clicks and pops (and persistent phase jumps) the sampling rates at the D->A and A->D conversion must match - exactly. The phone companies use very accurate clocks, synchronized across their whole network, to make this happen.
The phone companies originally used digital just to pack multiple phone calls for a hop from one analog switching center to another - and D->A->switch->A->D converted at each switch - with synchronization only needed between the ends of the hop. This saved a lot on cabling and gave better signal than analog transport, but not as good as digital from one "last mile" to the other. Then they added digital switching to eliminate the degradation of the multiple A/D conversions and simplify the switch - and spent a decade or more getting clocking synchronized across the whole network to eliminate the resulting glitches. Even today, in the being-retired POTS network, "timing is a third of the problem".
(These days the clocks are synchronized even between carriers by essentially all of them getting their master clocking from the atomic clocks of the GPS system. Before that they used things like LORAN D - a pre-satellite clocking-based radio navigation system for ships - or generated them in their own committee of atomic clocks and distributed the clocking along with the signals using the carriers of the SONET optical fibers or the T1 and E1 carriers of copper and microwave days, and these methods are still used to synchronize boxes that aren't in installations big enough to rate their own satellite-derived clock.)
The signal is encoded as a "DS0" stream of 8,000 8-bit samples per second, in one of two closely related floating-point-like coding schemes ("A-law" or "u-law" where "u" is "mu"), depending on whether you're using European or American-style standards.
So the signal is only capable of carrying 64,000 bits per second. (In fact the LSB may be "stolen" every few samples for ringing, off-hook, and dialing information, so only 56,000 bps are reliable - and it's actually a bit lower since some code sequences are forbidden by a regulation.)
Modern modems are designed around this and try to use as much as possible of these bits for data. In typical ISP-type modem banks the ISP end is connected to the phone company by a digital link and can directly control the bits, without incuring an A->D penalty, so the downlink can approach 56k, with the modem figuring out the actual sampling boundaries as part of the decoding. The uplink (or both sides in communication between two modems on analog POTS lines) comes pretty close to it - though it has to sacrifice some bandwidth to use a coding scheme that can survive clocking-rate errors between the modem's transmitter and the digitizer.
Of course if your VoIP link uses compression to carry your signal in less than 64k bps of payload, you're totally hosed. (And many of them do. For starters, if you're working over a dialup line you don't HAVE 64k bps to use.) Your modem assumes it's working over the POTS network and tries to use the bandwidth. And its signal gets totally hashed by the compression.
But even if you have the bandwidth (or the modem figures out that it's got a "noisy link" and down-speeds), you're still hosed. Because the clocking used for VoIP A->D and D->A steps is just not stable enough for the modem to take advantage of the bandwidth in the digital link.
One of the big pieces of persistent fallout from the war between
Which should qualify as a theft of a trade secret.
... since the victim is not denied use of their identity.
I can see where identity theft can be broken down
In the case of theft of trade secret the criminal deprives the victim of the information's secrecy.
But I agree that both terms, though recognized, are misnomers. Like "piracy" being used for illegal copying of entertainment, rather than theft of ships and cargo on the open ocean, generally with the murder of the crew and any passengers in an effort by the pirates to avoid identification and capture.
But this seems like splitting hairs in support of file sharing.
Using language properly, rather than letting the words drift into uselessness, is just such "splitting" of "hairs".
But I agree that hair-splitting is going on here.
As for supporting file sharing (by which I presume you mean "file sharing without the permission of the owner of the file's content" - another hair splitting in the interests of clarity), as you'll notice from my other postings in this discussion I don't support such copyright violation. I was just attempting to clarify a previous poster's meaning, in the face of confusion by followup posters.
Imagine a bunch of cars that accelerate from zero to sixty in 250 feet, then slam into a barrier, causing a multi-car pileup from which, starting just one inch further down the road, one of them rockets out at 85 miles per hour.
(Obviously they were inspired by the traffic on Interstate 280 on their way to SLAC. B-) )
The episodes were probably rips of the season premiere DVD that leaked before it aired (and were probably already on bit torrent and the newsgroups long before they were uploaded to YouTube). Why isn't FOX trying to go after the original hole on their end with this much effort?
If that's so:
- They still have to go after the actual posters. Publishing it widely is far more of an issue than merely getting hold of a copy and watching it or showing it to a few friends.
- Going after the poster may be part of chasing down the leak.
(Some watch the posting and skip the air show. Others are aware it's available and skip the air show, confident that they can pick up what they missed from the net.)
Still others watch the feed AND the air show - but watch the air show with less attention since they've already seen it before. Less commercials get watched (as they take less care to be back in front of the screen before the show restarts after a break), and those that are watched are watched with less excitement/attention (since the show raises less adrenaline when the surprises and plot twists are already known). This also reduces the value of the commercial slots to the sponsors, which may again map back to less money for the network and studio.
So why is it a problem to provide a copy of something that was already given away for free?
Two reasons:
- Shows like The Simpsons are payment to people like you for renting your eyeball time, to be sold to the sponsors. This is what pays for their creation and distribution. Showing it to you without the content owner's consent deprives the content owner of part of the value of his content.
- The first run of an ongoing cliffhanger-serial derives additional value from being a scarce resource - making it a bigger eyeball-draw. People actually go out of their way to avoid missing an episode, raising the ratings significantly. The commercials can be priced accordingly. Posting the episode in advance of the first showing reduces the legitimate showing to a rerun. (Some watch the posting and skip the air show. Others are aware it's available and skip the air show, confident that they can pick up what they missed from the net.) That kills the additional draw, reducing the audience, the ratings, and thus the money paid by the sponsors.
For something like "24" that's potentially a LOT of lost bucks.
... and how do you know that the person in question did not actually steal physical data carriers with data on them?
If he did, that would be "theft" - but of the data carrier. That might be an included crime - as bank robbery may include assault, battery, false imprisonment, and a host of other crimes that are secondary to the WAY the robbery was committed. But "data carriers" are cheap: Such an included crime would no doubt be petty rather than grand - a very minor element compared to the major issue.
That issue was the improper obtaining and publishing of the CONTENT of the data carrier, which is not "theft", but a crime of another name.
I'm not sure what you're getting at...
What he's getting at is the definition of "theft".
Theft has two elements:
- The bad guy gains the McGuffin.
- The owner loses the McGuffin. He doesn't have it any more.
There are other crimes where the bad guy improperly obtains something without the owner losing it. They are not "theft", because depriving the owner of his property has not occurred.
(Depriving the owner of much or all of the VALUE of his property may have occurred - which is typically why these non-theft crimes are similar enough to be confused with actual theft.)
Fox shows aren't important enough to be uploaded. The funny ones will air on other channels.
What's that got to do with 24, which is funny only unintentionally?
and who modded this down? seriously, stupidity like that shouldn't go unpunished.
So hit the "meta-moderate" button and see if that one comes up. If it does you can punish the moderator yourself. B-)
Seriously: Ding the user's moderations enough and the slashcode will give him moderation points less often, or not at all.
(Or are you claiming that thing she's on isn't the internet?)
B-)
Such a thing could have happened 100 years ago in Sibera (exit hole, entrance on the other side of Earth was still too small to notice).
...
The maximum possible energy available to such an "exit event"
Of course this doesn't eliminate the possibility of the event being the exit wound from a black hole of non-trivial mass arriving from space. But IMHO the ones that might be made in an accelerator or from a cosmic ray collision are too light to qualify.
There is a difference since the cosmic ray collision would create a moving black hole that escapes fast enough before it gets too big.
Granted such collisions create moving black holes.
But the bulk of them would be aimed at the earth. If they have a significant cross-section for absorbing matter they eat enough to be slowed down below orbital velocity before they exit.
Such a thing could have happened 100 years ago in Sibera (exit hole, entrance on the other side of Earth was still too small to notice).
The maximum possible energy available to such an "exit event" would be the mass-energy equivalent of the cosmic ray, the nucleus it hit to form the black hole, and the nuclei they ate on their way through WITHOUT being slowed below surface-level orbital velocity.
The Tunguska event was estimated at 10 to 20 Megatons. That's equivalent to the total conversion of 1 to 2 POUNDS of matter to energy.
Given that Avogadro's number is about 6e23, I think it's just a TAD too big to be the result of a black hole with the mass of a couple nuclei at even cosmic ray velocity chewing their way through the planet on a diet that doesn't make them fall back before breaking out the far side. B-)