They listen to what we say and act on it fully, rather than just doing the least amount of work they can get away with before moving on to some other project. I suspect that will change as demand for their services increases, then they will become another India.
That will change when they have acquired an in-depth understanding of your IP.
Then some of them may start a new company using it, or a spinoff of it, while the rest go to work for others who could use their experience on their products.
Just like it was with India. At first the place looks like a good administrative bet: Some good engineers with talent and English skills (so you can talk with them) who will work for cheap. And at first they buckle down hard - while they're running up the learning curve. So it looks like a good deal and more companies move there.
But once they've learned, why stick around? Especially in a location where the IP protections are less effective. Then the attrition starts.
At first The Suits think the attrition is just individual problems. Then they notice that's its got some spread, but they write it off to cultural issues. It takes a long time for them to realize that it's systematic and institutionalized - as they are FINALLY figuring out now, with India. So now they try it again with a new country - which looks better because they're still in the "drink it up" stage.
How many iterations with other countries, how much lost Trade Secret and other IP, and how many bankrupt companies will it take before management publications and business schools get it figured out and start teaching that outsourcing is a way to give away your company?
SMTP is designed for reliability. When a server OKs a client DATA submission, it is supposed to accept to route the mail no matter what, even if it might take a week to contact another server.
Then I just deliberately "broke" mine. B-)
My domain has lately been getting a horrendous load of spam addressed to nonexistent subdomains. The domain's mail is relayed - the MX points to a first-level SMTP server that is administrated by our ISP, which doesn't have a list of valid vs. invalid subdomains. (It does have very good blacklist processing so we're not about to pull it out of the loop and take on that load ourselves.)
The normal bouncing process would thus result in a bounce report back through the ISP's server to the purported source, then a returning bounce when the spammer's address turned out to be bogus or deactivated. So I've modified the mail configuration to accept and silently discard mail to nonexistent subdomains, as if it had been delivered. This eliminates a tripling of the traffic for the spam that evades the ISP's filters (as well as bogus bounce messages to people and domains that were forged as source addresses by the spammer.)
Bad for people trying to send mail to a REAL subdomain who typo it - now they get no indication that it got dropped. But that's a minor piece of "colateral damage" from the spam wars.
Actually, the gate that closed the road had been vandalized (lock/chain cut) and the road was therefore marked "open" when it had actually been closed. I dare say that most of us would have been caught in the same trap.:-(
You're confusing two closed roads.
Apparently he went past two signs at the start of the first closed road, then removed the rock barriers indicating the road was closed, and drove on.
It was when he finally decided that this wasn't going to work and attempted to retrace his path that he took a wrong turn at the vandalized gate and ended up on a second closed road forking off the first rather than back the main road. It was on this second road where he got stuck.
The more you know about the mechanisms, the farther back in time you can identify an event that may lead to a problem, and thus the more warning you get.
As the space weather has a very big influence on HF propagation, information services about it have been available for many years. Maybe thats one of the few groups who really use such information on a day to day basis
If I recall correctly it was RCA's international radio message service (back before transatlantic phone cables) that started space weather prediction. Different space weather means different ionospheric conditions and different bands are open or closed at intercontinental distances. Once they got decent reliability they were able to save a BUNCH of money by scheduling maintainence vs. uptime on their transmitters, rather than building more redundant transmitters, to maintain adequate service during "bad weather".
Why cant they just send them up there with the proper shielding in the first place?
Because (in addition to the weight issue) proper shielding for solar mass ejection events makes damage from cosmic radiation FAR WORSE. The small number of horrendous-energy particles, absent shielding, mainly pass through tissue causing litte damage. But run them through a "shield" and each kicks out a storm of lower (but still high) energy charged particles that are going slow enough to each cause a LOT of interactions in tissue.
To shield against cosmics you need a mountain (though an atmosphere does an OK job). So it's normally better to keep spacecraft walls thin and let them shine through. But that leaves you unshielded against coronal mass ejections.
So when the sun kicks up you shelter, and accept the temporary increase in exposure to secondary cosmic radiation to avoid the massive increase in exposure to a solar storm. Out of the bonfire, into the hot tub.
But you want to BE in the hot tub when the bonfire starts, rather than be out on a spacewalk or up to your ears in some half-assembled space-station project. Thus the importance of prediction.
... your grand-daddy's rifle is really going to help against tanks and automatic weaponry.
Read my sig.
Meanwhile, tanks without support troops are canned long-pig waiting to be cooked. For the support troops, read the sig again.
Not that it matters. If/when the troops are ordered out against the population, the population will have more than adequate access to the troops' own armories, along with plenty of training. You see, many of the civilians are ex-troops, while many of the troops believe in and understand their oath to the constitution - and some of those are the guys in charge of the armories. (And then there are all those NRA-certified instructors who TAUGHT the troops in the first place and teach the same skills to civilians. That's what it was founded FOR, after all.)
But they won't stop just with parity. There's the private arms and their users: Just for starters, varmint hunters are better armed for sniping than nearly all the troops (and most of the snipers), and they average better snipers than all but the top handfull. The population generally has better small-arms for accuracy, distance, and power - which more than makes up for the scarcity of full-autos.
Private gun owners and police are not generally on the range together - because the police are too embarrased by the contrast. The advantage is not so great against troops in general - who still haven't had as much practice and training. Specialists and the better private shooters are in the same league (sometimes literally).
And most people can buy a gas mask, but not many do, which means that anyone wanting to subdue you non-violently just has to use some simple tear gas.
My household has two gas masks per occupant as part of the safety equipment (not counting other suitable stuff, like paint respirators). That's because my wife and I grew up during, and were active in, the Vietnam era anti-war movmenet. (You'll see me on the front page of the Chicago Sun during the Chicago '68 Democratic convention, under the headline "Gasmasked Hippies Harass Police".) There are plenty of other ways to deal with teargas than a regular gas mask, too.
Meanwhile, while they're teargassing ONE house, the rest of the population can apply the true "code of the west": Get the drop on 'em and shoot 'em from behind.
... you have a very hard time getting replacement parts [for laptops], compared to a desktop system. You have a very hard time getting someone who knows as much about repairing a laptop, compared to a desktop system
Because desktop systems are common, open, and built on standards, while commercial laptops are proprietary, small-market, and closed.
When you distribute identical laptops, built on an open standard, with parts made in huge volumes, to every child in a computer-starved country, that situation reverses completely.
... "internet connectivity" isn't absolutely necessary; rather than run broadband to hundreds of points out in nowhere land, things can get started by setting up an isolated LAN with a single web server
Or good old "sneakernet", where you carry the disk (or memory stick) from one machine to another when you want to transfer some info.
I was here when broadband was a guy on a bus with a backpack full of floppies, dialing toll-call long-distance from Michigan to Indian Hill Il so I could exchange email (at dollars a call) was a breakthrough in connectivity, and changing resistors on the modem board to raise it from 110 to 300 baud was a major bump in bandwidth. We got a lot of stuff done in those days, too. It was MUCH better than NOTHING. This is the kind of thing people used as they developed stuff that was better.
Third-world countries have already done "networking" by mounting a battery-powered computer plus WiFi AP on a bike and riding a cricuit from town to town. At each town the local machine(s) swap files (including email) with the one on the bike as it goes by, and one of the towns has a connection to the rest of the world. The latency may be severe but the bandwidth of a big hard disk on a bicycle is more than adequate to support serious networking for a province, while the local skills are developed to put in their own successor network.
It's not just a toy. Email-by-bike is a major labor saving versus paper mail. That cost saving can be used both to enable more communication and to free hands for creating other value. And by creating a community of users who'd like more an d better, you KNOW that one of the first targets will be to improve it further.
How long before people in villages connected by "bikenet" decide they want something better, find out how to build pringles-can or big-ugly-dish antennas, and start hopping their WiFi over the hills between? B-)
That's how WE got the internet in the first place: being unsatisfied with the early, slow, expensive ways of networking and building ever better, faster, cheaper-per-bit upgrades. Why shouldn't people in third world countries be able to do something analogous on their own, once they can get their hands on the necessary technology?
Open-source principles will be good for innovation.
But there will be a BIG problem with laws - especially mandated safety and emissions testing.
That's designed on the assumption that large numbers of essentially identical cars are produced by well-funded manufacturers, so the cost of a lot of crash and emission-control testing and design work can be spread out over many units and become affordable.
Even if you are building using zero-emission or well-tested stock power plants, good luck on getting the safety-testing requirements relaxed. A poorly-designed car endangers, not just those in it, but those in vehicles around it.
It's also an object lesson on the pitfalls of lying one's ass off about everything. Sure, IBM had the lawyers, but SCO's case never had merit to begin with.
Which is why SCO can't back out gracefully.
IBM's policy (AFAIK) isn't to necessarily grind the opponent into the dust. It's more like "billions for defense, not one cent for tribute." They can accept the opponent throwing in the towel and retreating with some of their company intact.
(Example: Xerox's foray into the mainframe IBM-clone business: After Xerox decided it was failing, folded it, and sued IBM for unfair competition they proved in court that Xerox's business had actually been wildly profitable - but their accountants hadn't understood how to handle a leasing business so it LOOKED like they were losing money. Xerox went away with egg on their face and no mainframe business, but they're a power in the business machine market even today.)
But faced with an opponent who can't back down, the only effective way to carry out the policy is to burn their campus and sew salt on the ruins.
... why bother... their stock is toast, so couldn't IBM just buy a controlling interest for $11.2M and wind it down?
Doing so would invite thousands of nuisance suits from people who want to be bought off by being bought out. Suing IBM would become both a neat way to make a few million bucks and an exit strategy for every failing company that could make a vuagely-plausible argument that IBM had something to do with their fall.
So instead IBM has chosen to counter-attack, sucking all the blood out of SCO and leaving a dessicated corpse hanging on a spike for all to see.
It's an object lesson on the pitfalls of trying extortion on Big Blue.
They have had this policy for a while. SCO is just the biggest band of fools-or-crooks to come along in a long time, trying something new with ramifications in one of the biggest-bucks fights in a long time: the war between Microsoft and Open Source. So SCO gets the biggest spotlight.
I just haven't been able to think of a good reason to have programming code in a Word document...
How about displaying pretty, ever-changing, animated fractals that are rendered on-the-fly in the reader's machine? Try that without an embedded programming language.
I'm sure the major spam firewalls will also have signatures in a relatively short period of time. If my email spam/virus firewall will stop this I'm fine.
And what do you do about the exploits already mailed to you, before the firewall suppliers figure out signatures and put them in place?
And if they don't successfully design signatures to catch ALL exploits of the flaw, what do you do about later stuff that exploits the flaw differently, and arrives in the window before signatures for THAT exploit are developed.
And so on.
Reactive anti-malware firewalls and filters will always have vulnerability windows between exploit and update and will usually have multiple windows per vulnerability - because updates are triggered by exploits and signatures tend to be tuned to exploits rather than flaws.
Flaw-fixing has a window of vulnerability too, but only one (if it's done correctly).
When did they have doors in the Cypress Street Viaduct?
They had archways under the roadway at each set of supporting legs.
Drivers aware of the "get in a door because it has a frame to protect you" story interpreted these as equivalent and selectively stopped in the worst possible place.
Primary waves travel around six kilometers [four miles] per second, covering around 60 kilometers [40 miles] in 10 seconds. Secondary, or S, waves, which are usually more destructive, travel more slowly, around 3.5 kilometers [2.2 miles] per second, covering only around 17 kilometers [11 miles] in 10 seconds. Therefore, a city located around 60 kilometers [40 miles] from an epicenter would have around 15 seconds of lead time to prepare for an earthquake's impact, the time difference between the arrival of the first P wave at a recording station near the epicenter and the arrival of the S wave at the city itself
So even if the sensor gave its warning the moment the fracture occurred, and it took zero time to send it, it would only give 6.19% more warning of the S wave than the arrival of the P wave itself. Add transit time from the depth of the epicenter and the distance of the nearest sensor from it, plus the two second delay while it computes the need to sound the alarm, plus the speed-of-sound delay from the alarm to your ear, plus the time it takes to recognize that the alarm is an earthquake warning, and you'd have to be pretty far away for the alarm to be more useful than just taking cover when the P wave hits.
Seems to me that earthquakes already have a faster warning system built into them - at least for warning humans - than any system that could be built on this discovery.
Now for warning our automation (such as the applications suggested in the story), which has inadquate "senses" for earthquakes but speed-of-light communication, electronic reaction times and controls mechanical processes for which a few seconds of warning might mean the difference between safe shutdown and major calamity, this could be great.
this is a myth. The only thing this acomplishes is broken fingers.
A very dangerous myth, too. Most of the deaths in Loma Prieta may have resulted from this myth.
There were 57 deaths attributed directly to the earthquake, and 42 of them were in the Cypress Street Viaduct collapse.
At the start of the earthquake, the drivers stopped. Because of the myth, most of them tried to stop under the arches. When the strucutre collapsed, the arches came all the way down to the pavement, pancaking the cars beneath them, while the regions between the arches had enough space that it was possible, in many cases, to survive the collapse itself.
- - - -
Of course a lot of the deaths there are attributable, not just to the quake, but also to governmental interference with volunteer rescue attempts.
Most of those who survived the initial collapse were still trapped in their cars or the structure itself. When the quake hit virtually all of the the nearby citizens dropped what they were doing (along with any inter-group animosity) and immediately began rescue efforts. (A notable part of this was workers at a nearby warehouse improvising an elevator using a dumpster and a forklift.) The pulled quite a few out of the collapsed structure's "sandwitch" in the first half-hour or so (at considerable risk to themselves, especially given the risk of further collapse or rolling debris due to aftershocks). Then the authorities arrived.
The police kicked them out and cordoned off the area to await the official first responders. They eventually arrived - around sundown. Then they had insufficient light (given the power failure) and mainly waited around further for portable lighting to arrive. It was several hours before rescue attempts, with a smaller force of official rescuers, resumed. (Of course by then the "golden hour" had long since expired and those who had been in shock were now dead or beyond hope.)
Embrace? Novell "embraces" Microsoft's format insofar as they support it, which OpenOffice.org already does with the old format. Extend? That would be insane, since it would leave OOo incompatible.
But perhaps "Extinguish":
Extinguish OOo: if Novell's "in" with Microsoft gives them access to some Microsoft IP, beyond any open licensing Microsoft issues for their "Open XML", leaving OOo open to (successful) SCO-style suits and/or FUD.
Extinguish ODF: if support for Microsoft's (non-extensible by anybody else without introducing incompatibility) formats reduces the incentive for large end-users to switch to ODF, blocking the achievement of critical mass.
The coincidental timing of this announcement and the announcement of IETF's approval of an ODF standard seems something other than a fluke.
On one hand when the text of a law is ambiguous the courts are supposed to use the interpretation most in favor of the defendant.
On the other, if it meant what acklenx wished it would say nothing. So the courts would say that this excludes that meaning and the other must be what was meant - making it unabmiguous.
I would think people would start to notice that their phone would be dead after powering it off for several hours.
Nah. They'd just think the rechargable battery needed replacement.
Also: If they're programming the phone to record and then transmit later the logical time to transmit would be when the phone is charging - just after it reaches full charge.
"Getting warm" and "battery running down" are obvious from the physics.
I've done testing on a TDMA phone (both to be sure that it doesn't bug me and to see what it's pattern of "checking in" with the base station is) and I can confirm that the bulk of his descriptions are accurate.
I can also tell you WHY:
The "buzzing" occurs because the phone (both my TDMA and his GSM) transmits bursts of packets rather than operating continuously. The transmitter is only on for a moment during each burst, so you only hear the on/off switching when it interferes with other electronics.
It interferes with other electronics because the signal, when on, is strong enough to affect the voltages in the semiconductors. (Typically this happens by providing enough of a momentary voltage to forward-bias a diode or other junction - and even FET circuitry has effective P/N junctions - acting like a crystal set near a strong transmitter.) Digital circuitry may have enough noise immunity to continue functioning correctly despite the interference (unless it's strong), but the audio circuitry is affected directly, and there the signal is normally analog - with the interference simply adding to the audio signal.
Because it's affecting the audio processing you don't need an actual radio - let alone one tuned to the microwave frequencies of the cellphone. Any audio amplifier that isn't extremely well shielded will work just fine.
Like a crystal set the audio amplifier only detects AM - but the switching of the output amounts to extreme amplitude modulation, so it is picked up just fine.
He's right that if the cellphone is acting as an audio bug using the normal transmitting mode you'll get exactly the same buzz as you'd get from an actual call (as should be obvious).
One thing that he said that doesn't correspond to my experience: The phone I tested "checked in" with the network every five minutes or so: But it only transmitted twice - two "pops" about a second apart - rather than buzzing with a packet stream. (Of course since I didn't do this test with a GSM phone and am not familiar with their protocols I can't give you any information on whether he's correct there.)
Note that your location can be tracked just from the "check in", without any interference with the phone - or calls to it - at all. All it takes is for the phone to be on. (And if it has had its software tampered with - perhaps remotely - you can't be sure it's off unless you pull the battery.) This HAS been used to catch fugitives: In one instance (reported in the press) a serial killer on the lam cross-country powered up his cellphone on the road in rural Nevada and was in custody less than 30 minutes later.
Some of the "blinky light" decorations (such as those in battery packs) have their own power source and do not pull any appreciable power from the transmission. (Just a trace to trigger the LED controller chip.) Unfortunately, once they've been triggered they run their pattern, so you can't use the blinking to determine the pattern of transmission bursts.
Many public payphones in the US were removed - especially in inner cities - at the request of the police and federal law invesitigative agencies as part of the "drug war", to interfere with dope dealers' use of them for communication with their customers and suppliers. (They tried to get them ALL removed but SOME sanity prevailed.)
That's also why a lot of pay pay phones won't take incoming calls.
... opening them can be difficult enough to cause injuries that land people in the emergency room.
This is what product liability legislation is about: Making companies pay for the damage their products cause, so they think twice about producing dangerous products.
A few mulitmillion dollar judgements for people who cut the nerves in their hands on the sharp edges created by opening the packaging should make some execs start balancing "inventory shrinkage" from shoplifing more sanely against bottom-line shrinkage from damage to their customers' bodies.
That should make a BIG difference in package design quite quickly.
... would the ISM band be of any use in this case? It is unregulated, after all.
It's unsuitable precicely because it's unregulated. That means there's no (legal) guarantee that the signal won't be jammed, leaving a potentially hazardous unpiloted device-in-flight uncontrolled.
Slashdot Mirror
They listen to what we say and act on it fully, rather than just doing the least amount of work they can get away with before moving on to some other project. I suspect that will change as demand for their services increases, then they will become another India.
That will change when they have acquired an in-depth understanding of your IP.
Then some of them may start a new company using it, or a spinoff of it, while the rest go to work for others who could use their experience on their products.
Just like it was with India. At first the place looks like a good administrative bet: Some good engineers with talent and English skills (so you can talk with them) who will work for cheap. And at first they buckle down hard - while they're running up the learning curve. So it looks like a good deal and more companies move there.
But once they've learned, why stick around? Especially in a location where the IP protections are less effective. Then the attrition starts.
At first The Suits think the attrition is just individual problems. Then they notice that's its got some spread, but they write it off to cultural issues. It takes a long time for them to realize that it's systematic and institutionalized - as they are FINALLY figuring out now, with India. So now they try it again with a new country - which looks better because they're still in the "drink it up" stage.
How many iterations with other countries, how much lost Trade Secret and other IP, and how many bankrupt companies will it take before management publications and business schools get it figured out and start teaching that outsourcing is a way to give away your company?
SMTP is designed for reliability. When a server OKs a client DATA submission, it is supposed to accept to route the mail no matter what, even if it might take a week to contact another server.
Then I just deliberately "broke" mine. B-)
My domain has lately been getting a horrendous load of spam addressed to nonexistent subdomains. The domain's mail is relayed - the MX points to a first-level SMTP server that is administrated by our ISP, which doesn't have a list of valid vs. invalid subdomains. (It does have very good blacklist processing so we're not about to pull it out of the loop and take on that load ourselves.)
The normal bouncing process would thus result in a bounce report back through the ISP's server to the purported source, then a returning bounce when the spammer's address turned out to be bogus or deactivated. So I've modified the mail configuration to accept and silently discard mail to nonexistent subdomains, as if it had been delivered. This eliminates a tripling of the traffic for the spam that evades the ISP's filters (as well as bogus bounce messages to people and domains that were forged as source addresses by the spammer.)
Bad for people trying to send mail to a REAL subdomain who typo it - now they get no indication that it got dropped. But that's a minor piece of "colateral damage" from the spam wars.
Actually, the gate that closed the road had been vandalized (lock/chain cut) and the road was therefore marked "open" when it had actually been closed. I dare say that most of us would have been caught in the same trap. :-(
You're confusing two closed roads.
Apparently he went past two signs at the start of the first closed road, then removed the rock barriers indicating the road was closed, and drove on.
It was when he finally decided that this wasn't going to work and attempted to retrace his path that he took a wrong turn at the vandalized gate and ended up on a second closed road forking off the first rather than back the main road. It was on this second road where he got stuck.
The more you know about the mechanisms, the farther back in time you can identify an event that may lead to a problem, and thus the more warning you get.
As the space weather has a very big influence on HF propagation, information services about it have been available for many years.
Maybe thats one of the few groups who really use such information on a day to day basis
If I recall correctly it was RCA's international radio message service (back before transatlantic phone cables) that started space weather prediction. Different space weather means different ionospheric conditions and different bands are open or closed at intercontinental distances. Once they got decent reliability they were able to save a BUNCH of money by scheduling maintainence vs. uptime on their transmitters, rather than building more redundant transmitters, to maintain adequate service during "bad weather".
Why cant they just send them up there with the proper shielding in the first place?
Because (in addition to the weight issue) proper shielding for solar mass ejection events makes damage from cosmic radiation FAR WORSE. The small number of horrendous-energy particles, absent shielding, mainly pass through tissue causing litte damage. But run them through a "shield" and each kicks out a storm of lower (but still high) energy charged particles that are going slow enough to each cause a LOT of interactions in tissue.
To shield against cosmics you need a mountain (though an atmosphere does an OK job). So it's normally better to keep spacecraft walls thin and let them shine through. But that leaves you unshielded against coronal mass ejections.
So when the sun kicks up you shelter, and accept the temporary increase in exposure to secondary cosmic radiation to avoid the massive increase in exposure to a solar storm. Out of the bonfire, into the hot tub.
But you want to BE in the hot tub when the bonfire starts, rather than be out on a spacewalk or up to your ears in some half-assembled space-station project. Thus the importance of prediction.
... your grand-daddy's rifle is really going to help against tanks and automatic weaponry.
Read my sig.
Meanwhile, tanks without support troops are canned long-pig waiting to be cooked. For the support troops, read the sig again.
Not that it matters. If/when the troops are ordered out against the population, the population will have more than adequate access to the troops' own armories, along with plenty of training. You see, many of the civilians are ex-troops, while many of the troops believe in and understand their oath to the constitution - and some of those are the guys in charge of the armories. (And then there are all those NRA-certified instructors who TAUGHT the troops in the first place and teach the same skills to civilians. That's what it was founded FOR, after all.)
But they won't stop just with parity. There's the private arms and their users: Just for starters, varmint hunters are better armed for sniping than nearly all the troops (and most of the snipers), and they average better snipers than all but the top handfull. The population generally has better small-arms for accuracy, distance, and power - which more than makes up for the scarcity of full-autos.
Private gun owners and police are not generally on the range together - because the police are too embarrased by the contrast. The advantage is not so great against troops in general - who still haven't had as much practice and training. Specialists and the better private shooters are in the same league (sometimes literally).
And most people can buy a gas mask, but not many do, which means that anyone wanting to subdue you non-violently just has to use some simple tear gas.
My household has two gas masks per occupant as part of the safety equipment (not counting other suitable stuff, like paint respirators). That's because my wife and I grew up during, and were active in, the Vietnam era anti-war movmenet. (You'll see me on the front page of the Chicago Sun during the Chicago '68 Democratic convention, under the headline "Gasmasked Hippies Harass Police".) There are plenty of other ways to deal with teargas than a regular gas mask, too.
Meanwhile, while they're teargassing ONE house, the rest of the population can apply the true "code of the west": Get the drop on 'em and shoot 'em from behind.
Sounds like a self-fulfilling assumption to me--one that easily restricts competition in favor of the bigger, established businesses, no?
Yep.
But it's just fallout from the way things developed, not a planned lock-in.
Getting it relaxed might be a fight. But the safety argument will be hard
to refute without a bunch of expensive crash tests.
We might have success with a "type approval" regime for components with
safety implications.
... you have a very hard time getting replacement parts [for laptops], compared to a desktop system. You have a very hard time getting someone who knows as much about repairing a laptop, compared to a desktop system
Because desktop systems are common, open, and built on standards, while commercial laptops are proprietary, small-market, and closed.
When you distribute identical laptops, built on an open standard, with parts made in huge volumes, to every child in a computer-starved country, that situation reverses completely.
... "internet connectivity" isn't absolutely necessary; rather than run broadband to hundreds of points out in nowhere land, things can get started by setting up an isolated LAN with a single web server
Or good old "sneakernet", where you carry the disk (or memory stick) from one machine to another when you want to transfer some info.
I was here when broadband was a guy on a bus with a backpack full of floppies, dialing toll-call long-distance from Michigan to Indian Hill Il so I could exchange email (at dollars a call) was a breakthrough in connectivity, and changing resistors on the modem board to raise it from 110 to 300 baud was a major bump in bandwidth. We got a lot of stuff done in those days, too. It was MUCH better than NOTHING. This is the kind of thing people used as they developed stuff that was better.
Third-world countries have already done "networking" by mounting a battery-powered computer plus WiFi AP on a bike and riding a cricuit from town to town. At each town the local machine(s) swap files (including email) with the one on the bike as it goes by, and one of the towns has a connection to the rest of the world. The latency may be severe but the bandwidth of a big hard disk on a bicycle is more than adequate to support serious networking for a province, while the local skills are developed to put in their own successor network.
It's not just a toy. Email-by-bike is a major labor saving versus paper mail. That cost saving can be used both to enable more communication and to free hands for creating other value. And by creating a community of users who'd like more an d better, you KNOW that one of the first targets will be to improve it further.
How long before people in villages connected by "bikenet" decide they want something better, find out how to build pringles-can or big-ugly-dish antennas, and start hopping their WiFi over the hills between? B-)
That's how WE got the internet in the first place: being unsatisfied with the early, slow, expensive ways of networking and building ever better, faster, cheaper-per-bit upgrades. Why shouldn't people in third world countries be able to do something analogous on their own, once they can get their hands on the necessary technology?
Open-source principles will be good for innovation.
But there will be a BIG problem with laws - especially mandated safety and emissions testing.
That's designed on the assumption that large numbers of essentially identical cars are produced by well-funded manufacturers, so the cost of a lot of crash and emission-control testing and design work can be spread out over many units and become affordable.
Even if you are building using zero-emission or well-tested stock power plants, good luck on getting the safety-testing requirements relaxed. A poorly-designed car endangers, not just those in it, but those in vehicles around it.
With cars the "blue screen of death" is literal.
It's also an object lesson on the pitfalls of lying one's ass off about everything. Sure, IBM had the lawyers, but SCO's case never had merit to begin with.
Which is why SCO can't back out gracefully.
IBM's policy (AFAIK) isn't to necessarily grind the opponent into the dust. It's more like "billions for defense, not one cent for tribute." They can accept the opponent throwing in the towel and retreating with some of their company intact.
(Example: Xerox's foray into the mainframe IBM-clone business: After Xerox decided it was failing, folded it, and sued IBM for unfair competition they proved in court that Xerox's business had actually been wildly profitable - but their accountants hadn't understood how to handle a leasing business so it LOOKED like they were losing money. Xerox went away with egg on their face and no mainframe business, but they're a power in the business machine market even today.)
But faced with an opponent who can't back down, the only effective way to carry out the policy is to burn their campus and sew salt on the ruins.
... why bother... their stock is toast, so couldn't IBM just buy a controlling interest for $11.2M and wind it down?
Doing so would invite thousands of nuisance suits from people who want to be bought off by being bought out. Suing IBM would become both a neat way to make a few million bucks and an exit strategy for every failing company that could make a vuagely-plausible argument that IBM had something to do with their fall.
So instead IBM has chosen to counter-attack, sucking all the blood out of SCO and leaving a dessicated corpse hanging on a spike for all to see.
It's an object lesson on the pitfalls of trying extortion on Big Blue.
They have had this policy for a while. SCO is just the biggest band of fools-or-crooks to come along in a long time, trying something new with ramifications in one of the biggest-bucks fights in a long time: the war between Microsoft and Open Source. So SCO gets the biggest spotlight.
I just haven't been able to think of a good reason to have programming code in a Word document ...
How about displaying pretty, ever-changing, animated fractals that are rendered on-the-fly in the reader's machine? Try that without an embedded programming language.
B-)
I'm sure the major spam firewalls will also have signatures in a relatively short period of time. If my email spam/virus firewall will stop this I'm fine.
And what do you do about the exploits already mailed to you, before the firewall suppliers figure out signatures and put them in place?
And if they don't successfully design signatures to catch ALL exploits of the flaw, what do you do about later stuff that exploits the flaw differently, and arrives in the window before signatures for THAT exploit are developed.
And so on.
Reactive anti-malware firewalls and filters will always have vulnerability windows between exploit and update and will usually have multiple windows per vulnerability - because updates are triggered by exploits and signatures tend to be tuned to exploits rather than flaws.
Flaw-fixing has a window of vulnerability too, but only one (if it's done correctly).
When did they have doors in the Cypress Street Viaduct?
They had archways under the roadway at each set of supporting legs.
Drivers aware of the "get in a door because it has a frame to protect you" story interpreted these as equivalent and selectively stopped in the worst possible place.
From TFA:
Primary waves travel around six kilometers [four miles] per second, covering around 60 kilometers [40 miles] in 10 seconds. Secondary, or S, waves, which are usually more destructive, travel more slowly, around 3.5 kilometers [2.2 miles] per second, covering only around 17 kilometers [11 miles] in 10 seconds. Therefore, a city located around 60 kilometers [40 miles] from an epicenter would have around 15 seconds of lead time to prepare for an earthquake's impact, the time difference between the arrival of the first P wave at a recording station near the epicenter and the arrival of the S wave at the city itself
So even if the sensor gave its warning the moment the fracture occurred, and it took zero time to send it, it would only give 6.19% more warning of the S wave than the arrival of the P wave itself. Add transit time from the depth of the epicenter and the distance of the nearest sensor from it, plus the two second delay while it computes the need to sound the alarm, plus the speed-of-sound delay from the alarm to your ear, plus the time it takes to recognize that the alarm is an earthquake warning, and you'd have to be pretty far away for the alarm to be more useful than just taking cover when the P wave hits.
Seems to me that earthquakes already have a faster warning system built into them - at least for warning humans - than any system that could be built on this discovery.
Now for warning our automation (such as the applications suggested in the story), which has inadquate "senses" for earthquakes but speed-of-light communication, electronic reaction times and controls mechanical processes for which a few seconds of warning might mean the difference between safe shutdown and major calamity, this could be great.
"... brace yourself in a doorframe ..."
this is a myth. The only thing this acomplishes is broken fingers.
A very dangerous myth, too. Most of the deaths in Loma Prieta may have resulted from this myth.
There were 57 deaths attributed directly to the earthquake, and 42 of them were in the Cypress Street Viaduct collapse.
At the start of the earthquake, the drivers stopped. Because of the myth, most of them tried to stop under the arches. When the strucutre collapsed, the arches came all the way down to the pavement, pancaking the cars beneath them, while the regions between the arches had enough space that it was possible, in many cases, to survive the collapse itself.
- - - -
Of course a lot of the deaths there are attributable, not just to the quake, but also to governmental interference with volunteer rescue attempts.
Most of those who survived the initial collapse were still trapped in their cars or the structure itself. When the quake hit virtually all of the the nearby citizens dropped what they were doing (along with any inter-group animosity) and immediately began rescue efforts. (A notable part of this was workers at a nearby warehouse improvising an elevator using a dumpster and a forklift.) The pulled quite a few out of the collapsed structure's "sandwitch" in the first half-hour or so (at considerable risk to themselves, especially given the risk of further collapse or rolling debris due to aftershocks). Then the authorities arrived.
The police kicked them out and cordoned off the area to await the official first responders. They eventually arrived - around sundown. Then they had insufficient light (given the power failure) and mainly waited around further for portable lighting to arrive. It was several hours before rescue attempts, with a smaller force of official rescuers, resumed. (Of course by then the "golden hour" had long since expired and those who had been in shock were now dead or beyond hope.)
Embrace? Novell "embraces" Microsoft's format insofar as they support it, which OpenOffice.org already does with the old format. Extend? That would be insane, since it would leave OOo incompatible.
But perhaps "Extinguish":
Extinguish OOo: if Novell's "in" with Microsoft gives them access to some Microsoft IP, beyond any open licensing Microsoft issues for their "Open XML", leaving OOo open to (successful) SCO-style suits and/or FUD.
Extinguish ODF: if support for Microsoft's (non-extensible by anybody else without introducing incompatibility) formats reduces the incentive for large end-users to switch to ODF, blocking the achievement of critical mass.
The coincidental timing of this announcement and the announcement of IETF's approval of an ODF standard seems something other than a fluke.
On one hand when the text of a law is ambiguous the courts are supposed to use the interpretation most in favor of the defendant.
On the other, if it meant what acklenx wished it would say nothing. So the courts would say that this excludes that meaning and the other must be what was meant - making it unabmiguous.
I would think people would start to notice that their phone would be dead after powering it off for several hours.
Nah. They'd just think the rechargable battery needed replacement.
Also: If they're programming the phone to record and then transmit later the logical time to transmit would be when the phone is charging - just after it reaches full charge.
"Getting warm" and "battery running down" are obvious from the physics.
I've done testing on a TDMA phone (both to be sure that it doesn't bug me and to see what it's pattern of "checking in" with the base station is) and I can confirm that the bulk of his descriptions are accurate.
I can also tell you WHY:
The "buzzing" occurs because the phone (both my TDMA and his GSM) transmits bursts of packets rather than operating continuously. The transmitter is only on for a moment during each burst, so you only hear the on/off switching when it interferes with other electronics.
It interferes with other electronics because the signal, when on, is strong enough to affect the voltages in the semiconductors. (Typically this happens by providing enough of a momentary voltage to forward-bias a diode or other junction - and even FET circuitry has effective P/N junctions - acting like a crystal set near a strong transmitter.) Digital circuitry may have enough noise immunity to continue functioning correctly despite the interference (unless it's strong), but the audio circuitry is affected directly, and there the signal is normally analog - with the interference simply adding to the audio signal.
Because it's affecting the audio processing you don't need an actual radio - let alone one tuned to the microwave frequencies of the cellphone. Any audio amplifier that isn't extremely well shielded will work just fine.
Like a crystal set the audio amplifier only detects AM - but the switching of the output amounts to extreme amplitude modulation, so it is picked up just fine.
He's right that if the cellphone is acting as an audio bug using the normal transmitting mode you'll get exactly the same buzz as you'd get from an actual call (as should be obvious).
One thing that he said that doesn't correspond to my experience: The phone I tested "checked in" with the network every five minutes or so: But it only transmitted twice - two "pops" about a second apart - rather than buzzing with a packet stream. (Of course since I didn't do this test with a GSM phone and am not familiar with their protocols I can't give you any information on whether he's correct there.)
Note that your location can be tracked just from the "check in", without any interference with the phone - or calls to it - at all. All it takes is for the phone to be on. (And if it has had its software tampered with - perhaps remotely - you can't be sure it's off unless you pull the battery.) This HAS been used to catch fugitives: In one instance (reported in the press) a serial killer on the lam cross-country powered up his cellphone on the road in rural Nevada and was in custody less than 30 minutes later.
Some of the "blinky light" decorations (such as those in battery packs) have their own power source and do not pull any appreciable power from the transmission. (Just a trace to trigger the LED controller chip.) Unfortunately, once they've been triggered they run their pattern, so you can't use the blinking to determine the pattern of transmission bursts.
Many public payphones in the US were removed - especially in inner cities - at the request of the police and federal law invesitigative agencies as part of the "drug war", to interfere with dope dealers' use of them for communication with their customers and suppliers. (They tried to get them ALL removed but SOME sanity prevailed.)
That's also why a lot of pay pay phones won't take incoming calls.
... opening them can be difficult enough to cause injuries that land people in the emergency room.
This is what product liability legislation is about: Making companies pay for the damage their products cause, so they think twice about producing dangerous products.
A few mulitmillion dollar judgements for people who cut the nerves in their hands on the sharp edges created by opening the packaging should make some execs start balancing "inventory shrinkage" from shoplifing more sanely against bottom-line shrinkage from damage to their customers' bodies.
That should make a BIG difference in package design quite quickly.
... would the ISM band be of any use in this case? It is unregulated, after all.
It's unsuitable precicely because it's unregulated. That means there's no (legal) guarantee that the signal won't be jammed, leaving a potentially hazardous unpiloted device-in-flight uncontrolled.