Fiber optic cables arent switches at all, or even active.
Actually, some of them are.
One really useful example is doping the fiber with small amounts of an atom that lases in the frequency band of the light being carried. Then you wrap a bit of the fiber around a lamp giving off a suitable higer pump frequency of light. Result: A repeater amplifier. Feed it a little power and it boosts your signal.
There are several other hacks. (At least one of them is a logic gate.)
I don't think he is complaining about wikipedia in itself. More the fact that a person with an agenda could replace clean methodical bias free information with drivel changing the view for everyone in the process. The original source may not have the time or inclination to maintain his articles, so the biased view remains.
This, by the way, is one of the things the Xanadu hypertext system was intended to prevent.
A link-end was not just to a particular page, but a particular section of text (as small as a single byte - and if I'd had my way, a particular crack between two bytes {I have my reasons}) in the context of a particular document at a particular moment in its edit history.
From there, if you wanted to see the "current version", you could jump to the end of the edit history. Or you could browse the (published) edit history. Or you could retrieve other documents that also included/referenced the text (those PARTICULAR bytes, not strings that were identical) in question.
Gee. I wonder why it didn't get done and the WWW took over. B-)
What is interesting about compressed air though, the energy you get out of it is NOT what you have put into it. The energy comes from the ambient temperature of the air. This means that if a compression technique could be found that is efficient enough then you could have a potential self filling energy tank.
The best you can do is minimize your losses. The "energy from the ambient temperature of the air" is heat from the air. When you compress the air it becomes hot, and you have to deliver heat TO the air (or somewhere) to get it to cool back down - which it will eventually, unless you manage to come up with a perfect insulator to surround your tank.
Heat only moves over a temperature difference, and the lower the difference the slower it moves. A compressed-air energy storage system is also a heat pump - dumping heat during "charge", absorbing it during "discharge". The energy represented by moving the heat across the temperature difference is your system loss. The best you can do is minimize it, for instance by compressing VERY SLOWLY into a BIG heat-exchanger, and similarly expanding very slowly ditto.
Unfortunately, neither is practical. Especially the latter - where you need compressed air's enormous power to accellerate your car. So you pay the carnot tax.
Like gasoline engines, you waste power in order to avoid even greater waste - for instance, by carrying around a more efficient engine that is so heavy it eats more than the fuel savings.
I bet if you run the numbers you'll find that electric motor/supercapacitor systems already beat the pants off a compressed-air "peaking" system for cars. The new, highly-efficient, rapid-charge "nanotech" lithium ion cells might do even better.
Why is it always the seemingly most liberal places that seem to be so conservative on certain issues?
Because the so-called liberals have been in control of the media while the positions of the current camps labeled "liberal" and "conservative" have become approximately the reverse of the historical meaning of the terms.
A major component of the so-called conservative position is the rule of laws, not men. That includes the bill of rights - the whole bill of rights - as intended by the people who wrote it.
A major component of the so-called liberal position is suppression of politically-incorrect speech - which includes any expression of a policital idea at odds with any of the so-called liberal positions.
This is reflected in campaign finance "reform" laws whose clear design (not just whose effect) is to suppress the political speech of grass-roots movements and organizations, leaving a handfull billionaires and primarily left-wing institutions (such as the broadcast and print media and the labor unions) with a virtual monopoly on campaigning.
Blogs have to go because they have been used by grass-roots groups to bypass the gatekeepers and swing elections. The latest example is the way the blogs exposed the forged documents behing the _60 minutes_ hit piece on Bush at the end of the last presidential election. But there are numerous previous examples.
Three I remember are the letter-writing campaigns, organized via blogging, that took out Roberti and Roos (California legislators famous for sponsoring the legislation to ban so-called assault weapons) and Tom Foley (the only Speaker of the House ever to be defeated for reelection).
Blogging to spread the word and organize voters and campaigns is effective. Therefore the establishment will ban it. "Liberals" - who have the most to lose, since it challenges a keystone of their power - write and pass the laws to ban it. "Conservatives" oppose it, but weakly. It sometimes works in their favor. But it is outside their control, enabling the citizens to pick their own candidates and swing party policy rather than being stuck voting for the people and policies picked in the party's back room deals.
Things are legal until otherwise shown/declared. P2P is legal and does not need to be declared legal at this point.
Having the Supreme Court explicitly state that, as a general matter, P2P (even if it is PRIMARILY used for crime) is a constitutionally protected form of speech, is nevertheless a very valuable thing.
For starters, it puts the congress on notice that they can't just arbitrarily ban it, and the lower courts on notice that they're expected to whack suits like this one - quickly and without a lot of consideration and expense for the defendant.
Such a declaration from the courts will drastically raise the bar for the "content industry".
[...] it is easy to understand that part of the intent of the 4th was to insure privacy.
It may not be quite as easy to see, but the third amendment is also about both privacy, not just a form of taxation.
Part of the reason for quartering troops with the locals is so the troops can act as spys, observing, for the government, the activity of each family and its neighbors, and reporting anything suspicious to the officers of the army.
It's an old tradition, and one of the things that the founders wanted to end.
Grass uses a LOT of water. (Not surprising, since it's got a lot of surface area.) Acre for acre it takes more water than trees or pretty much any food crop. It evaporates something like six times as much water as a lake.
So you're not going to want to convert land to growing grass if it doesn't have a lot of water available allready. So much for the southwest - and a lot of areas where you have the other main ingredient: sunlight.
But if you're already growing and mowing it, what a deal.
I'd love to get a lawnmower that delivered fuel pellets rather than mulch that needs to be hauled away or worked back into the ground. Given the price of natural and the small amount of heating I need to do in the climate where I live, a pellet stove burning lawn trimmings would be a godsend.
After her cellphone directory got published (perhaps due to a bluejacking, perhaps via cracking her home computer and uploading a sync backup), she might just be a bit more security conscious with respect to information appliances.
She could put together a testimonial about how, after consulting with experts, she's replacing her security flakey cellphone and home computer with something more robust. Then segway into being surprised at how this wonderful new Linux so easy to use that even she can even use it all by herself, though there are all these nice computer geeks that are happy to help her out whenever she has any questions. And how sexy it is that they're so smart...
You're reading it from a translation. Which is actually beside the point.
The people who are concerned about this believe that a tatooed or implanted personal I.D. number, used to identify a person for financial transactions, to be a close enough fit to the verse to satisfy the prophecy. (In that case, the "666" just becomes the number of the beast/man behind the scheme.)
Pages one through four are just a very good story.
Page five is political propaganda - with pages one through four as setup.
I call 'em like I see 'em.
As for lightening up: When the government establishment is staging yet another massive ripoff of people like you and me, it's not a "lighten up" issue.
What we have here is an obvious piece of advocacy journalism:
- Over four pages of coverage of an extrordinary accomplishment by four extraordiarily talented and hard-working undocumented immigrant children.
- Most of the fifth page lamenting their financial handicap and plugging a particular federal bill to give MILLIONS of illegal-immigrant children a place at the federal tit and an entitlement to further boost the drain on the taxpayers pocketbooks - with a hefty chunk of the cashflow siphoned off to pay for more beaucrats.
- A copule sentences on how such a program would rip college opportunities out of the hands of other children who are citizens - whose parents are already being taxed - sometimes into poverty - to pay for the institutions and scholarships that would be transferred to the illegals.
Yes it stinks for the kids who built the 'bot - and others like them. But how many similar stories DIDN'T get told about rural-poor US citizen kids who performed similar feats, with similar lack of resources?
It's NOT rare. For starters, if you hang out at NASA for any length of time you'll notice that a LOT of "rocket scientists" are from such backgrounds. Many have such stories to tell. (And in NASA's heyday the educational opporiunities for a kid who was rural, southern, or (horrors!) both were comparable to those of these kids.)
Creating a new entitlement program will redistribute the resources differently but not increase them overall. Further, with the mismanagement and overhead typical of government programs, it's likely to destroy far more opportunities than it creates.
Children who are US citizens are already at a signficant disadvantage to immigrants and student-visa holders. The latter tend to get financial aid as grants - even if they are children of the rich - while the former are left with mostly loans which must be paid off at interest or suplemented by low-paid jobs that take time from study. Tuition has become so astronomical that in many fields the citizens are just dropping out, as the lifetime benefit of the education is exceeded by its unsubsidized cost.
Are we to believe that these four are typical, rather than extrordinary? (There are extrordinary individuals in all large populations.) Are we to believe the children of illegal immigrants are so much MORE competent than the children of citizens that more good than harm will come from from transferring educational opportunites from the latter to the former, dropping a bunch of them through the cracks on the way?
In order to press for a government solution, the story carefully ignores (except to belittle in passing) private sector aid. There are an enormous number of private scholarship programs and private charatable foundations with scholarship programs, with an explosion of criteria for who they will help. (The tax system makes it profitable to create them, and has for decades. And people whos story is like that of these kids who finally make it often create leg-up funds for others like themselves.) They're not well known. But for kids with track records like these there are likely to be hundreds of them that might fund them through school.
IMHO the real tragedy here is that the educational institution (with the gleeful aid of the media) did NOT help these kids dig up private funding. Instead it left them in low-paying jobs and is using their plight to push for legislation to feather its own nest.
Meanwhile, the MIT administration really ought to be busting their butts to dig up scholarship money for these kids. (Especially if they remember what the Model Railroad Club wrought.) Four children of migrant workers who, while still in highschool, beat their team with $800 to buy balloons, tampons, and PVC pipe should be the star recruits for their next freshman class.
The solution to spam is not government intervention, but better mail protocols. All the laws in the world are not going to fix spam, worms, spyware and various types of net attacks. Better protocols and network management are the solution to that.
I call bullshit.
Spam vs. antispam is a race between weapons and armor. In such a race weapons always win.
Viruses and antivirus tools, ditto.
Like many other forms of crime, Spam is a way to be vastly profitable by misusing other people's resources without permission. And about one person in a hundred is a psychopath, immune to social pressure. So as long as spam remains profitable and without overriding negative consequences it will continue.
Government has a role to play in ending spam: Enabling the damaged individuals to bring actions to recover their damages from the spammers. Enforcing the negative consequences of judgements on the spammers. Cutting off internet access from repeat offenders who are not swayed by purely financial consequences. Making a show of the negative consequences, to deter others considering spamming from starting.
Technical solutions won't work - there's always another hole, and anything that blocks spam can also block legitimate email. Motivational solutions are required. Until the negative consequences of spamming (weighted by their likelyhood) outweigh the positive, spamming will continue and increase.
With FOSS, if they *become* educated, they can read the source code - or they can ask someone who *is* educated to read the source code for them.
Hear hear!
While I was an undergraduate, even though I was taking classes, I got an in-depth education in software mainly by reading code:
- partly from listings,
- partly from disassembling a whole operating system with a little help from a listing of its predecessor when it was much smaller,
- greatly aided by a scheduling system that left me with time on my hands waiting for my turn at the machine, or the machine on my hands waiting for output to be printed and input to be punched, and then making upgrades to it.
(One of the first upgrades was to build, first an editor, then a full-blown emulation of the Dartmouth Basic run-what-you're-edtiing environment (but using Fortran on a tape-based machine). Then I didn't have to wait for listing-to-card, card-to-tape, and tape-to-print services and could do a debugging turn in minutes rather than one or two per day. That drastically accellerated the learning process.)
This was in the days when OSes were so small that you COULD disassemble them single-handedly in a few months of part-time effort. But having a home machine, complete source code to a very advanced system, and powerful software development tools in your hands 24/7 (maybe divided by number of family members) should make a similar learning experience easier, faster, and deeper for those people of Brazil who wish to try it.
I expect an ongoing avalanche of new stuff from them, starting within a couple years after this program gets off the ground.
P2P networks are copyright neutral -- anything can go over the network.
Note that the same applies to the Internet itself, and to a plethora of its components: Routers, TCP, FTP, cabling, webservers, etc.
There is good reason to believe that a vast majority of the traffic on the Internet is "pirated" copyrighted material. If the movie, music, and broadcast industry conglomerates can use a "mostly used for piracy" argument to shut down one application or one protocol, they can use the same argument to shut down ANY or ALL of them.
The entertainment conglomerates would LOVE to have the Internet go away. (Some of them even flamed it systematically as it was catching on. Some of them still do.) It pulls eyeballs from their products and is thus perceived as cutting into their revenue.
Remember that the Internet itself was designed as a peer-to-peer system - an interconnection of a vast network of endpoints that exchange information. The perception of it as a client-server, vendor-customer network (like, say, a broadcast medium) is an illusion, created by three factors:
- The enormous success of a few client-server apps, such as the web, (where the servers are usually run by a corp or institution),
- the rise of ISPs (with terms of service discouraging consumer-grade customers from hosting servers), and
- the shortage of IPv4 address (leading to workarounds such as dynamic address allocation and NAT, which also impeed hosting a server on a consumer-grade connection).
Possibly more interesting than the music app ...
on
RFID Music Player
·
· Score: 1
... are the tiny chunks of Ruby code that read and write RFID tags using a standard chunk of hardware and libusb.
It tries to match the IP address of the sender to their domain name. [...]If it can't [...]then it sends a challenge/response email back to the senders email address (not to the zombie PC). If the sender is genuine they click a button on the challenge/response email and the original mail gets accepted.
Great:
My site administers its own mail. But direct SMTP outbound mail uses a DSL line whose reverse translation points to our DSL provider, while outbound mail through the local mail servers goes through a mailserver site at a different ISP whose reverse translation will also point to them rather than us.
So all our outgoing mail will receive the challenge. Mail is handled by polling, so every outgoing letter to a site using their tool will now require two extra email transactions, two extra wait-for-poll delays, plus an extra wait-for-sender-to-read-email delay. (No more "fire and forget - now email accounts have to be checked several times a day.)
"Click a button"? On a mail reader without HTML or with it disabled? More like "copy and edit, and hope you don't screw it up".
It doesn't lower any threshold, this case was settled and therefore sets no precedent.
I didn't say that the CASE may lower a threshold. I said that USING the GPL may lower a threshold.
When part of your payment is intangible fallout from your open source distribution it may take less action by the infringer (or an action he's more likely to take) to produce damages a court would recognize than it would, say, in the case of a proprietary program.
[...] this case shows that licensing your code under the GPL doesn't jepoardize your ability to haul offenders into court and claim (and get settlements for) damages for violating your license terms.
In fact it may enhance this ability, by lowering the threshod for claiming damages.
But remember, the GPL itself is not specifically "tested", per se, because GPL software developers assert them rights granted to them via copyright on an individual basis.
Also: As I read it GPL wasn't strictly at issue here. The core issue was whether a standards organization can claim IP rights over the standard itself when that standard is embodied as code. Once that issue was clearly articulated both parties seemed to take the enforcability of the terms of the GPL as a given.
What is important here is that it was the terms of the GPL that allwed Drew Technologies to haul the SAE into court, claim damages from them, and get them to settle WITH a payment of damages.
The SAE had posted Drew Tech's code, claiming they owned the copyright because it was derivitive of the standard and demanding a "subscription fee" from both Drew Tech and from all other users of Drew Tech's GPLed code.
The GPL violation was the hook Drew Tech chose to file a takedown demand, drag the SAE into court, and demand damages for violation of THEIR copyrights - like any other GPL software provider. B-)
Even in the absense of an actual decision, this case shows that licensing your code under the GPL doesn't jepoardize your ability to haul offenders into court and claim (and get settlements for) damages for violating your license terms.
As a given market matures, instead of offering any real additional services that truly add value, they figure out ways to extract more cash from what they already have by adding extra fees, differentiating "services" that technically entail no additional cost to them, etc.
There may be a few that try to cut off something that is clearly part of full-blown service and/or used to be standard, then charge you extra to get it back. (Consider throttling of cable internet, for example.) Consumer fraud statutes apply if they get caught. And others apply, too, if they do something blatantly anti-competitive.
But ISPs usually try to give you extra services that DO add value beyond the basic service. (Otherwise you wouldn't pay the extra dollars, would you?)
Of course they try to design them to require minimal costs on their end and use equipment they already have. If the value of the service is high it can command a hefty price. If the cost to provide it also nearly non-existent, that hefty price is mostly profit - at least until some kind of competition drives it down.
Classic example is the "enhanced features" of the PSTN: Call waiting, call forwarding, three-way calling, etc. These were virtually impossible when phone switches were special-purpose hardware made of relays or logic circuits. Once the control plane was replaced by general-purpose computers they became a matter of a little extra software and a few extra table entries. Nearly no cost, and a few dollars per month from millions of subscribers adds up fast. These days your regular bill just pays to keep the infrastructure alive, while the "value-added features" may be responsible for ALL your phone company's profit.
And for its demise, as these features become standard on cellphone subscriptions, and client-side functions on VoIP (where they can be provided without the carrier's help, knowlege, consent, or bill).
Of course, with the cutthroat competition driving the price of raw bandwidth down near its cost, ISPs want to find a way to enhance their revenue. The phone company's model was wildly successful and very visible. So they all want to emulate it.
All the priority routing means is that a router pays attention to a single flag in the packet header.
True in the core. NOT true on the edge.
The network can not trust the customer's agent to mark the packets honestly and MUST rewrite the QoS at the border. Otherwise the customer could just flag his traffic for priority handling and get it for free - and create a tragedy of the commons as everybody marked everything as special to avoid congestion, rendering the QoS markings meaningless.
This already happened. The internet protocol has quality of service bits specifically intended to give traffic special handling that it needs. (For example, you could mark VoIP traffic to be routed quickly - and dropped if it was delayed too much to make room for more timely following packets.) But before such applicaions were widely deployed, a well-known Ma$sive software vendor "Improved" their IP stack by marking everything for special handling. This polluted the IP QoS (type of service) bits, which are now ignored by the network.
With a cheater widely deployed, enterprises wishing to deploy VoIP internally have to resort to tricks like putting the VoIP phones on a special subnet that is given higher priority in their routers. Meanwhile, the workstations (some of which are still cheating) can't get the high QoS and thus can't run VoIP softphone applications as well as the special-purpose desk phones beside them. (The cheater would now love to play in this market - but he's hoist by his own petard.)
In the routers at the edge, identifying flows to validate and rewrite QoS to authenticate those that get special handling to the core, is a big job. It creates a table explosion (tracking every flow - if only to remember that it DOESN'T get special treatment), requiring extra RAM. And it requires a signifi
This problem could be reduced dramatically if WAPs shipped from the factory with complex random passwords WEP enabled and complex random WEP keys.
The incentive for the manufacturers is for wireless access points to NOT be secure out-of-the-box.
If it's not secure, it's plug-and-play. Plug it in, it's up. If it's more secure, it makes instalation (to the point of getting traffic through it) more difficult.
Insecurity doesn't affect the user until they get burned - mainly by lower performance as their bandwidth gets leached (assuming their important applications, like banking, already use end-to-end encryption). Leaching might not even be noticed. If it is, they can diagnose it and tighten things up.
Slashdot Mirror
Fiber optic cables arent switches at all, or even active.
Actually, some of them are.
One really useful example is doping the fiber with small amounts of an atom that lases in the frequency band of the light being carried. Then you wrap a bit of the fiber around a lamp giving off a suitable higer pump frequency of light. Result: A repeater amplifier. Feed it a little power and it boosts your signal.
There are several other hacks. (At least one of them is a logic gate.)
I don't think he is complaining about wikipedia in itself.
More the fact that a person with an agenda could replace clean methodical bias free information with drivel changing the view for everyone in the process.
The original source may not have the time or inclination to maintain his articles, so the biased view remains.
This, by the way, is one of the things the Xanadu hypertext system was intended to prevent.
A link-end was not just to a particular page, but a particular section of text (as small as a single byte - and if I'd had my way, a particular crack between two bytes {I have my reasons}) in the context of a particular document at a particular moment in its edit history.
From there, if you wanted to see the "current version", you could jump to the end of the edit history. Or you could browse the (published) edit history. Or you could retrieve other documents that also included/referenced the text (those PARTICULAR bytes, not strings that were identical) in question.
Gee. I wonder why it didn't get done and the WWW took over. B-)
What is interesting about compressed air though, the energy you get out of it is NOT what you have put into it. The energy comes from the ambient temperature of the air. This means that if a compression technique could be found that is efficient enough then you could have a potential self filling energy tank.
The best you can do is minimize your losses. The "energy from the ambient temperature of the air" is heat from the air. When you compress the air it becomes hot, and you have to deliver heat TO the air (or somewhere) to get it to cool back down - which it will eventually, unless you manage to come up with a perfect insulator to surround your tank.
Heat only moves over a temperature difference, and the lower the difference the slower it moves. A compressed-air energy storage system is also a heat pump - dumping heat during "charge", absorbing it during "discharge". The energy represented by moving the heat across the temperature difference is your system loss. The best you can do is minimize it, for instance by compressing VERY SLOWLY into a BIG heat-exchanger, and similarly expanding very slowly ditto.
Unfortunately, neither is practical. Especially the latter - where you need compressed air's enormous power to accellerate your car. So you pay the carnot tax.
Like gasoline engines, you waste power in order to avoid even greater waste - for instance, by carrying around a more efficient engine that is so heavy it eats more than the fuel savings.
I bet if you run the numbers you'll find that electric motor/supercapacitor systems already beat the pants off a compressed-air "peaking" system for cars. The new, highly-efficient, rapid-charge "nanotech" lithium ion cells might do even better.
Why is it always the seemingly most liberal places that seem to be so conservative on certain issues?
Because the so-called liberals have been in control of the media while the positions of the current camps labeled "liberal" and "conservative" have become approximately the reverse of the historical meaning of the terms.
A major component of the so-called conservative position is the rule of laws, not men. That includes the bill of rights - the whole bill of rights - as intended by the people who wrote it.
A major component of the so-called liberal position is suppression of politically-incorrect speech - which includes any expression of a policital idea at odds with any of the so-called liberal positions.
This is reflected in campaign finance "reform" laws whose clear design (not just whose effect) is to suppress the political speech of grass-roots movements and organizations, leaving a handfull billionaires and primarily left-wing institutions (such as the broadcast and print media and the labor unions) with a virtual monopoly on campaigning.
Blogs have to go because they have been used by grass-roots groups to bypass the gatekeepers and swing elections. The latest example is the way the blogs exposed the forged documents behing the _60 minutes_ hit piece on Bush at the end of the last presidential election. But there are numerous previous examples.
Three I remember are the letter-writing campaigns, organized via blogging, that took out Roberti and Roos (California legislators famous for sponsoring the legislation to ban so-called assault weapons) and Tom Foley (the only Speaker of the House ever to be defeated for reelection).
Blogging to spread the word and organize voters and campaigns is effective. Therefore the establishment will ban it. "Liberals" - who have the most to lose, since it challenges a keystone of their power - write and pass the laws to ban it. "Conservatives" oppose it, but weakly. It sometimes works in their favor. But it is outside their control, enabling the citizens to pick their own candidates and swing party policy rather than being stuck voting for the people and policies picked in the party's back room deals.
Capitalists will sell you the rope [with] which you will hang them[]
And the capitalists gleefully sold the USSR rope by the shipload.
And the USSR, while prattling that old saying, hung itself.
And the capitalists laughed all the way to the bank.
Then they came back and sold the people of the FORMER USSR all SORTS of stuff.
And bought stuff from them too.
And are still laughing.
Right along with the people of the former USSR.
Things are legal until otherwise shown/declared. P2P is legal and does not need to be declared legal at this point.
Having the Supreme Court explicitly state that, as a general matter, P2P (even if it is PRIMARILY used for crime) is a constitutionally protected form of speech, is nevertheless a very valuable thing.
For starters, it puts the congress on notice that they can't just arbitrarily ban it, and the lower courts on notice that they're expected to whack suits like this one - quickly and without a lot of consideration and expense for the defendant.
Such a declaration from the courts will drastically raise the bar for the "content industry".
[...] it is easy to understand that part of the intent of the 4th was to insure privacy.
It may not be quite as easy to see, but the third amendment is also about both privacy, not just a form of taxation.
Part of the reason for quartering troops with the locals is so the troops can act as spys, observing, for the government, the activity of each family and its neighbors, and reporting anything suspicious to the officers of the army.
It's an old tradition, and one of the things that the founders wanted to end.
Grass uses a LOT of water. (Not surprising, since it's got a lot of surface area.) Acre for acre it takes more water than trees or pretty much any food crop. It evaporates something like six times as much water as a lake.
So you're not going to want to convert land to growing grass if it doesn't have a lot of water available allready. So much for the southwest - and a lot of areas where you have the other main ingredient: sunlight.
But if you're already growing and mowing it, what a deal.
I'd love to get a lawnmower that delivered fuel pellets rather than mulch that needs to be hauled away or worked back into the ground. Given the price of natural and the small amount of heating I need to do in the climate where I live, a pellet stove burning lawn trimmings would be a godsend.
After her cellphone directory got published (perhaps due to a bluejacking, perhaps via cracking her home computer and uploading a sync backup), she might just be a bit more security conscious with respect to information appliances.
She could put together a testimonial about how, after consulting with experts, she's replacing her security flakey cellphone and home computer with something more robust. Then segway into being surprised at how this wonderful new Linux so easy to use that even she can even use it all by herself, though there are all these nice computer geeks that are happy to help her out whenever she has any questions. And how sexy it is that they're so smart...
Sounds like a Nikola Tesla solution.
You're reading it from a translation. Which is actually beside the point.
The people who are concerned about this believe that a tatooed or implanted personal I.D. number, used to identify a person for financial transactions, to be a close enough fit to the verse to satisfy the prophecy. (In that case, the "666" just becomes the number of the beast/man behind the scheme.)
Man, it's just a very good story. Lighten up.
Pages one through four are just a very good story.
Page five is political propaganda - with pages one through four as setup.
I call 'em like I see 'em.
As for lightening up: When the government establishment is staging yet another massive ripoff of people like you and me, it's not a "lighten up" issue.
What we have here is an obvious piece of advocacy journalism:
- Over four pages of coverage of an extrordinary accomplishment by four extraordiarily talented and hard-working undocumented immigrant children.
- Most of the fifth page lamenting their financial handicap and plugging a particular federal bill to give MILLIONS of illegal-immigrant children a place at the federal tit and an entitlement to further boost the drain on the taxpayers pocketbooks - with a hefty chunk of the cashflow siphoned off to pay for more beaucrats.
- A copule sentences on how such a program would rip college opportunities out of the hands of other children who are citizens - whose parents are already being taxed - sometimes into poverty - to pay for the institutions and scholarships that would be transferred to the illegals.
Yes it stinks for the kids who built the 'bot - and others like them. But how many similar stories DIDN'T get told about rural-poor US citizen kids who performed similar feats, with similar lack of resources?
It's NOT rare. For starters, if you hang out at NASA for any length of time you'll notice that a LOT of "rocket scientists" are from such backgrounds. Many have such stories to tell. (And in NASA's heyday the educational opporiunities for a kid who was rural, southern, or (horrors!) both were comparable to those of these kids.)
Creating a new entitlement program will redistribute the resources differently but not increase them overall. Further, with the mismanagement and overhead typical of government programs, it's likely to destroy far more opportunities than it creates.
Children who are US citizens are already at a signficant disadvantage to immigrants and student-visa holders. The latter tend to get financial aid as grants - even if they are children of the rich - while the former are left with mostly loans which must be paid off at interest or suplemented by low-paid jobs that take time from study. Tuition has become so astronomical that in many fields the citizens are just dropping out, as the lifetime benefit of the education is exceeded by its unsubsidized cost.
Are we to believe that these four are typical, rather than extrordinary? (There are extrordinary individuals in all large populations.) Are we to believe the children of illegal immigrants are so much MORE competent than the children of citizens that more good than harm will come from from transferring educational opportunites from the latter to the former, dropping a bunch of them through the cracks on the way?
In order to press for a government solution, the story carefully ignores (except to belittle in passing) private sector aid. There are an enormous number of private scholarship programs and private charatable foundations with scholarship programs, with an explosion of criteria for who they will help. (The tax system makes it profitable to create them, and has for decades. And people whos story is like that of these kids who finally make it often create leg-up funds for others like themselves.) They're not well known. But for kids with track records like these there are likely to be hundreds of them that might fund them through school.
IMHO the real tragedy here is that the educational institution (with the gleeful aid of the media) did NOT help these kids dig up private funding. Instead it left them in low-paying jobs and is using their plight to push for legislation to feather its own nest.
Meanwhile, the MIT administration really ought to be busting their butts to dig up scholarship money for these kids. (Especially if they remember what the Model Railroad Club wrought.) Four children of migrant workers who, while still in highschool, beat their team with $800 to buy balloons, tampons, and PVC pipe should be the star recruits for their next freshman class.
The solution to spam is not government intervention, but better mail protocols. All the laws in the world are not going to fix spam, worms, spyware and various types of net attacks. Better protocols and network management are the solution to that.
I call bullshit.
Spam vs. antispam is a race between weapons and armor. In such a race weapons always win.
Viruses and antivirus tools, ditto.
Like many other forms of crime, Spam is a way to be vastly profitable by misusing other people's resources without permission. And about one person in a hundred is a psychopath, immune to social pressure. So as long as spam remains profitable and without overriding negative consequences it will continue.
Government has a role to play in ending spam: Enabling the damaged individuals to bring actions to recover their damages from the spammers. Enforcing the negative consequences of judgements on the spammers. Cutting off internet access from repeat offenders who are not swayed by purely financial consequences. Making a show of the negative consequences, to deter others considering spamming from starting.
Technical solutions won't work - there's always another hole, and anything that blocks spam can also block legitimate email. Motivational solutions are required. Until the negative consequences of spamming (weighted by their likelyhood) outweigh the positive, spamming will continue and increase.
With FOSS, if they *become* educated, they can read the source code - or they can ask someone who *is* educated to read the source code for them.
Hear hear!
While I was an undergraduate, even though I was taking classes, I got an in-depth education in software mainly by reading code:
- partly from listings,
- partly from disassembling a whole operating system with a little help from a listing of its predecessor when it was much smaller,
- greatly aided by a scheduling system that left me with time on my hands waiting for my turn at the machine, or the machine on my hands waiting for output to be printed and input to be punched,
and then making upgrades to it.
(One of the first upgrades was to build, first an editor, then a full-blown emulation of the Dartmouth Basic run-what-you're-edtiing environment (but using Fortran on a tape-based machine). Then I didn't have to wait for listing-to-card, card-to-tape, and tape-to-print services and could do a debugging turn in minutes rather than one or two per day. That drastically accellerated the learning process.)
This was in the days when OSes were so small that you COULD disassemble them single-handedly in a few months of part-time effort. But having a home machine, complete source code to a very advanced system, and powerful software development tools in your hands 24/7 (maybe divided by number of family members) should make a similar learning experience easier, faster, and deeper for those people of Brazil who wish to try it.
I expect an ongoing avalanche of new stuff from them, starting within a couple years after this program gets off the ground.
P2P networks are copyright neutral -- anything can go over the network.
Note that the same applies to the Internet itself, and to a plethora of its components: Routers, TCP, FTP, cabling, webservers, etc.
There is good reason to believe that a vast majority of the traffic on the Internet is "pirated" copyrighted material. If the movie, music, and broadcast industry conglomerates can use a "mostly used for piracy" argument to shut down one application or one protocol, they can use the same argument to shut down ANY or ALL of them.
The entertainment conglomerates would LOVE to have the Internet go away. (Some of them even flamed it systematically as it was catching on. Some of them still do.) It pulls eyeballs from their products and is thus perceived as cutting into their revenue.
Remember that the Internet itself was designed as a peer-to-peer system - an interconnection of a vast network of endpoints that exchange information. The perception of it as a client-server, vendor-customer network (like, say, a broadcast medium) is an illusion, created by three factors:
- The enormous success of a few client-server apps, such as the web, (where the servers are usually run by a corp or institution),
- the rise of ISPs (with terms of service discouraging consumer-grade customers from hosting servers), and
- the shortage of IPv4 address (leading to workarounds such as dynamic address allocation and NAT, which also impeed hosting a server on a consumer-grade connection).
... are the tiny chunks of Ruby code that read and write RFID tags using a standard chunk of hardware and libusb.
It tries to match the IP address of the sender to their domain name. [...]If it can't [...]then it sends a challenge/response email back to the senders email address (not to the zombie PC). If the sender is genuine they click a button on the challenge/response email and the original mail gets accepted.
Great:
My site administers its own mail. But direct SMTP outbound mail uses a DSL line whose reverse translation points to our DSL provider, while outbound mail through the local mail servers goes through a mailserver site at a different ISP whose reverse translation will also point to them rather than us.
So all our outgoing mail will receive the challenge. Mail is handled by polling, so every outgoing letter to a site using their tool will now require two extra email transactions, two extra wait-for-poll delays, plus an extra wait-for-sender-to-read-email delay. (No more "fire and forget - now email accounts have to be checked several times a day.)
"Click a button"? On a mail reader without HTML or with it disabled? More like "copy and edit, and hope you don't screw it up".
Yuck!
It doesn't lower any threshold, this case was settled and therefore sets no precedent.
I didn't say that the CASE may lower a threshold. I said that USING the GPL may lower a threshold.
When part of your payment is intangible fallout from your open source distribution it may take less action by the infringer (or an action he's more likely to take) to produce damages a court would recognize than it would, say, in the case of a proprietary program.
[...] this case shows that licensing your code under the GPL doesn't jepoardize your ability to haul offenders into court and claim (and get settlements for) damages for violating your license terms.
In fact it may enhance this ability, by lowering the threshod for claiming damages.
But remember, the GPL itself is not specifically "tested", per se, because GPL software developers assert them rights granted to them via copyright on an individual basis.
Also: As I read it GPL wasn't strictly at issue here. The core issue was whether a standards organization can claim IP rights over the standard itself when that standard is embodied as code. Once that issue was clearly articulated both parties seemed to take the enforcability of the terms of the GPL as a given.
What is important here is that it was the terms of the GPL that allwed Drew Technologies to haul the SAE into court, claim damages from them, and get them to settle WITH a payment of damages.
The SAE had posted Drew Tech's code, claiming they owned the copyright because it was derivitive of the standard and demanding a "subscription fee" from both Drew Tech and from all other users of Drew Tech's GPLed code.
The GPL violation was the hook Drew Tech chose to file a takedown demand, drag the SAE into court, and demand damages for violation of THEIR copyrights - like any other GPL software provider. B-)
Even in the absense of an actual decision, this case shows that licensing your code under the GPL doesn't jepoardize your ability to haul offenders into court and claim (and get settlements for) damages for violating your license terms.
As a given market matures, instead of offering any real additional services that truly add value, they figure out ways to extract more cash from what they already have by adding extra fees, differentiating "services" that technically entail no additional cost to them, etc.
There may be a few that try to cut off something that is clearly part of full-blown service and/or used to be standard, then charge you extra to get it back. (Consider throttling of cable internet, for example.) Consumer fraud statutes apply if they get caught. And others apply, too, if they do something blatantly anti-competitive.
But ISPs usually try to give you extra services that DO add value beyond the basic service. (Otherwise you wouldn't pay the extra dollars, would you?)
Of course they try to design them to require minimal costs on their end and use equipment they already have. If the value of the service is high it can command a hefty price. If the cost to provide it also nearly non-existent, that hefty price is mostly profit - at least until some kind of competition drives it down.
Classic example is the "enhanced features" of the PSTN: Call waiting, call forwarding, three-way calling, etc. These were virtually impossible when phone switches were special-purpose hardware made of relays or logic circuits. Once the control plane was replaced by general-purpose computers they became a matter of a little extra software and a few extra table entries. Nearly no cost, and a few dollars per month from millions of subscribers adds up fast. These days your regular bill just pays to keep the infrastructure alive, while the "value-added features" may be responsible for ALL your phone company's profit.
And for its demise, as these features become standard on cellphone subscriptions, and client-side functions on VoIP (where they can be provided without the carrier's help, knowlege, consent, or bill).
Of course, with the cutthroat competition driving the price of raw bandwidth down near its cost, ISPs want to find a way to enhance their revenue. The phone company's model was wildly successful and very visible. So they all want to emulate it.
All the priority routing means is that a router pays attention to a single flag in the packet header.
True in the core. NOT true on the edge.
The network can not trust the customer's agent to mark the packets honestly and MUST rewrite the QoS at the border. Otherwise the customer could just flag his traffic for priority handling and get it for free - and create a tragedy of the commons as everybody marked everything as special to avoid congestion, rendering the QoS markings meaningless.
This already happened. The internet protocol has quality of service bits specifically intended to give traffic special handling that it needs. (For example, you could mark VoIP traffic to be routed quickly - and dropped if it was delayed too much to make room for more timely following packets.) But before such applicaions were widely deployed, a well-known Ma$sive software vendor "Improved" their IP stack by marking everything for special handling. This polluted the IP QoS (type of service) bits, which are now ignored by the network.
With a cheater widely deployed, enterprises wishing to deploy VoIP internally have to resort to tricks like putting the VoIP phones on a special subnet that is given higher priority in their routers. Meanwhile, the workstations (some of which are still cheating) can't get the high QoS and thus can't run VoIP softphone applications as well as the special-purpose desk phones beside them. (The cheater would now love to play in this market - but he's hoist by his own petard.)
In the routers at the edge, identifying flows to validate and rewrite QoS to authenticate those that get special handling to the core, is a big job. It creates a table explosion (tracking every flow - if only to remember that it DOESN'T get special treatment), requiring extra RAM. And it requires a signifi
I find it encouraging that the competition cannot even spell architect....
I usually can but not on a Saturday morning. B-)
This problem could be reduced dramatically if WAPs shipped from the factory with complex random passwords WEP enabled and complex random WEP keys.
The incentive for the manufacturers is for wireless access points to NOT be secure out-of-the-box.
If it's not secure, it's plug-and-play. Plug it in, it's up. If it's more secure, it makes instalation (to the point of getting traffic through it) more difficult.
Insecurity doesn't affect the user until they get burned - mainly by lower performance as their bandwidth gets leached (assuming their important applications, like banking, already use end-to-end encryption). Leaching might not even be noticed. If it is, they can diagnose it and tighten things up.
Security impacts ease-of-use, and thus sales.
500,000 full-length articles... with well over 25% factually correct!
Which makes it a LOT better than broadcast and print news media. B-)