I can think of another reason why the Republicans would be opposed to this: it would allow the Census Bureau to come up with a more accurate count of the populations of lower-class urban neighborhoods, which tend to vote Democratic. This may give the Democrats more seats in the House of Representatives.
Not if it also identified the ones that were ineligible to vote (felons, illegals) and eliminated them from the electorate.
Maybe it's me, but that article was waay too long winded to state the obvious: As long as Microsoft canturn a profit after any sort of penalities given them, they have no motovation to comply to any sort of antitrust regulation.
Close. But you missed the point of part of the wind: That complying with the rulings COSTS Microsoft more than the fines.
So it itsn't just that the fines are too little to matter. It's that COMPLIANCE is TOO EXPENSIVE, and the fines are too small to shift that balance.
Just like alcohol prohibition and the "War on Drugs", it's explicitly PROFITABLE to DISOBEY the rulings.
Of course this brings up a question:
Does this behavior make Microsoft a "Continuing Criminal Enterprise"?
If so, it could be VERY interesting if that's brought up the NEXT time somebody brings Microsoft in for antitrust or other violations.
This reminds me of the scene in the movie, where Ed Norton's character explains that if it is cheaper for a company to pay fines, than to recall a potentially-deadly product, then they will opt for the former.
But that's the way it's SUPPOSED to be.
The company is in business solely to maximize profit. This makes it's behavior fit the definition of psychopathy/sociopathy - like about one/three percent of the population.
The government is in business to co-opt vigilantism by providing a coherent and understandable set of rules, including punishments for non-compliance that:
- convince most psychopaths/sociopaths that their best interests are served by following the rules, and
- taking out of circulation any that don't follow the rules, once it becomes clear that they won't follow them.
If the fines and other sanctions are low enough that businesses find it more profitable to be scofflaws than law-abiding, it's the fault of the GOVERNMENT, according its own legal theories.
Yes, I know that you're continuing the political propaganda ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H alleged joke.
But, no, polling does not show it would play well in the midwest. Or with the right wing - especially the Christian Right. Even a trial balloon on this subject would result in a guaranteed loss for Bush in the next election.
FYI: There is nobody more rabidly opposed to implanted RFID tracking devices than a Christian Fundamentalist. While right-wingers in general are suspicious of programs that invade personal privacy (since they are perceived as mostly used, once instituted, by left-wingers to dump on their political enemies), an implanted I.D. chip plays directly into one of the Christian Fundamentalists' hot buttons.
An implanted RFID device is an indellible "mark" transmitting a number - the serial number of the device (which is used as an index to an external database of personal information) and/or any stored information (which is also encoded as a binary string, i.e. a number).
According to a Christian Fundamentalist, tagging people with a government-mandated indelible identification number is applying the "Mark of the Beast". (See the Book of Revalations.) The person who would cause that to occur as a government program is the Antichrist, it happens as the end times and final battle are approaching, anybody who lets it happen to him has signed up with the wrong side, etc.
This opposition to anything even approximating applying a number to people, especially if related to financial transactions (which includes aid programs) is SO strong that it has been a problem even during the rollouts of Social Security, the Income Tax, credit cards, ATM debit cards, and online banking services.
Bush and his administration have been clueless enough to do a number of things to tweak off their electoral base. But mandating an implanted I.D. number in the face of this well-known (on the right) hotbutton issue would be cluelessness far beyond the pale. Essentially ALL of his advisors would be SCREAMING at him if he gave the SLIGHTEST sign of being in favor of such a scheme.
Which is why you KNOW this is another (literally) damned April Fool joke.
Loading them up might help. Fool sovles problem.
on
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Or, of course, ISPs could just multicast-enable their networks.
Right now they have little incentive - because enabling multicast for anything but distribution of their own "content" is perceived by ISPs as an added cost that provides them with no new revenue. So ISPs have an incentive not to enable it (or not to enable it generally even if it's on for themselves) while independent net-casters are stuck buying fat pipes to separately transmit streams to each customer - limiting their potential audience to the few they can afford to feed, and thus limiting their load on the ISPs.
But consider what happens with a broad adoption of a cooperative, peer-to-peer, flooding-protocol broadcast workaround:
- The listeners are now using their otherwise unused uplink to forward and fork the stream.
- The broadcaster's potential audience is no longer limited by the size of his feed - so it can expand without limit, just as if multicast were enabled.
- The load on the ISP is the same as if the broadcaster had to give each of his customers a separate unicast feed - but FAR higher than if multicast were used. (And it's harder to manage because it originates diffusely, both throughout the ISP's customer base and incoming from multiple external sources.)
Now the ISP gets the NxUnicast load ANYHOW. This gives him a strong financial incentive to enable multicast - even for external originators - and try to move his users to it.
If the application can detect, and automatically use, multicast when/where it's available, it will provide an INSTANT reward to the ISP for enabling multicast. Even if the program originated outside his network, the peer-to-peer links within it would be multicast, producing a drastic cut in his traffic. (The application could easily have multiple multicast islands connected by unicast links - and even adjust the routing to merge multicast islands and minimize back-and-forth unicast routes connecting them.) The forward-looking ISP gets lowered costs, his competition still pays. Market advantage. So once one adopts it, the rest either stampeed with him or get hit in the pocketbook and left in the dust.
Turning on multicast is a win-win for the ISP (who gets lower costs and better system utilization) and his customers (who get much lower latency when the stream is delivered by multicast than by many unicast hops.) This gives the application authors an incentive to include opportunistic-multicast and the users to prefer a multicast-capable solution over a unicast-only first cut.
= = = = = =
The original article may have been an April Fool joke. But it has pointed out a solution to one of our big problems. A peer-to-peer streaming broadcast application, combining the usenet flooding algorithm and voluntary-link-subscription approach with dynamic configuration ala Bit Torrent and opportunistic multicast will provide:
- a useful service under current ISP policies
- a built-in, seamless and automatic, migration path to a better solution, and
- an evolutionary selection pressure on ISPs to implement it.
Is this the same thing/similar to what they did in the mid 90's with the "Common Hardware Reference Platform"? The idea was a common set of (PowerPC-based) chips, support chips, firmware, drivers, etc. covering everything (in theory) from desktops to embedded systems. What? You don't remember that? Worked well, didn't it.
Reminds me of Sun's SPARC archetecture. This was supposed to be used in everything from the top-end processors to little embedded thingies, using different performance silicon but a common instruction set. And it was supposed to be open.
So how about putting a fuel cell in a little black brick with a power-brick cord on it, for the rest of us?
Plug it into your ORDINARY laptop and compute until you run out of gas (or vodka or whatever).
Or plug it into anything else that needs a few watts.
Yes it's not as convenient as having it IN the laptop. But it also puts a bunch of the heat and all the exhaust water somwehere other than my lap. And it doesn't limit my between-fill sessions to the size of the tank I can fit into the laptop.
And like trailer-tow vehicle vs. RV (the former being cheaper long-term because you don't have to throw out the house when the powertrain wears out), the laptop might well need replacing (through obsolescence or breakage) long before the fuel cell became unusable. (Or vice-versa, if the fuel cell becomes poisoned.)
While we're at it, how about a killowatt-level one that runs on odorized propane and mounts in the side of that trailer, next to (or integrated with) the water heater, propane refrigerator, and/or furnace? (Killowatt so I can run the air conditioner "in the wild" - something just beyond a trialer-roof full of current-tech solar panels.)
Building a dedicated fuel cell into a particluar model of laptop strikes me as gratuitous short-sightedness (though slightly more convenient as a laptop than a two-piece model).
(Now if this were Sony I'd expect them to be playing status games, with the high-end maximally-overpriced laptop having a larger tank than the next one down (at a cost differential FAR beyond any manufacturing cost times markup difference), and brick-chargers (in ugly bricks) for their less-well-heeled customers.)
You mean unlike today, where anything we build now will be payed for by our grandchildren.:-)
Actually it gets paid for a couple times by us and several more times by our grandchildren.
The resources spent on a project run on borrowed or printed money are resources that aren't available for other purposes - and thus drive up the price of that category of goods. Money "borrowed" by inflating the currency is value sucked out of the dollars and dollar-denominated resources held by the general population - yet the government pays off the "debt" to the central bank, with interest, from future taxes.
I saw details of one of the licenses, and AFAICC they do not have to pay SCO anything in the future for using Linux if Linux contains no SCO code.
But SCO is currently claiming that ALL code working to Unix-related interfaces (including such things as all clients of errno.h) are derived works and thus "SCO code".
But, if the parent is true, then EV1 and SCO should lose their rights under the GPL.
the reason the Justice department is arguing against co-op broadband systems is then his big business buddies in the telecom and cable industry don't get paid...
That's an interesting interpretation.
Especially given that they're NOT arguing aginst broadband operated by co-ops. (Which, by the way, the explicitly support, along with broadband supplied by other little companies, even if it competes with their "big business buddies".)
They're arguing against broadband companies run by county and local GOVERNMENTS. And even then they're only arguing against them when they're implemented in violation of the objections of the STATE governments from which the smaller governments derive their powers and mandates.
The issue was STRICTLY whether an FCC regulation allowing "any entity" to operate a broadband company free of state regulation could be used by cities, counties, and the like, as arms of their state, to escape control by their state legislatures and constitutions.
But of course certain rabid Bush-haters just LOVE to lie about it, claiming that the Bush administration is trying to block small broadband carriers, rather than to block governments from squeezing them out, with tax-subsidized unfair competition and conflict-of-interest driven regulatory roadblocks against any little guy that wants to compete with THEIR operation.
Then make your own choices and take your chances with the fallout from them. Just don't expect me to take the consequences of your choices, too.
And don't say I didn't warn you.
We wouldn't have to rent a clue if you'd provide some real indication that you were offering us one for free. Please provide us that indication. I, for one, would like to get it right.
What you appear to be doing is asking me to identify myself, my family, my friends, and my acquaintences, on a very large and very open forum, and tell you - and everybody listening, potentially including exactly the totally-information-aware security agencies in question - all of our stories about every time some authority figure dumped on us and/or got a bee in his bonnet about one or more of us being the bad guys.
Given that the subject at hand is the way such authority has been used (especially MISused) historically, I trust you'll understand if I decline to hand out such anaecdotal data on a platter. (If nothing else, it wouldn't be consistent with my argument to do so, would it? B-) )
So you'll have to make your own judgements about MY judgement and/or about the underlying problem.
Regarding my judgement: I've made over 1900 slashdot postings under this handle. Look up a few and see what you think.
Regarding external evidence: Follow some of the leads I've given you (like COINTELPRO), or consult any person who has taken postgraduate courses in history.
(Meanwhile, I WILL mention that my handle {Ungrounded Lightning Rod} is a reference to this very issue - and a previous employer's request that his employees, while posting to Usenet, try to avoid becoming lightning rods for controversy that might reflect poorly {sideflash?} on the company. B-) I'm willing to talk about it in person, and I'm not blackmailable by threats to expose a connection between my personal identity and some handle. And I don't encrypt or obfuscate routing on the traffic I use to post, so security agencies can identify me easily if they ever feel like it. I simply make it a policy, when posting under a handle, not to identify myself, or confirm or deny speculation, in an online setting.)
They get to know your location on a precise time and date.
Don't forget while you're there to only pay in plain cash. If you use a credit card or a check, then they'll know you were there either.
Don't forget to take the battery out of your cell phone. Otherwise it will tell them (about every five minutes if they don't explicitly ask it for more reports), exactly where you are.
On the other side, we have people wielding Orwell. Big Brother is watching you, the government is evil and corrupt, you can't take a piss off-center without a dozen people knowing about it. Here's a hypothetical story I made up, complete with a series of lottery-scale unlikely events, leading to a conclusion that mostly just serves make you scared of your own shadow.
Rent a clue.
The Orwellian scenarios sound like a bunch of pipe-dreaming by paranoids to you because they haven't happened to you.
Yet.
But trust me. They do happen. They happen a lot.
They've happened to me. They've happened to lots of my friends. They've happened to my wife. They've happened to a number of our ancestors. (On her side, at least one per generation for the last three, and that's just counting the ones on the DIRECT line.)
They happened to opposition political figures big time, over and over. Not just in countries "over there" - but right here at home. (Look up the FBI's "COINTELPRO" just for starters.) Every twenty years or so the stuff that happened twenty years back comes to light. And the story is always the same: "That was THEN. That COULDN'T happen NOW." And twenty years later you find out that it WAS happening now, too.
j'accuse is alive and well, as is stereotyping, as is guilt-by-association, and so on.
The conspiracy-theory tinfoil-hat stereotype is VERY convenient for the people who are actually running such operations. It discredits their victims's cries for help, as well as the warnings of those who haven't yet been vicitmized (as far as they can tell) but who understand the dynamics and can thus read the writing on the wall.
The biggest trouble with these things is that, by the time they come for YOU, it's too late. So you have to head them off while they're still being formed up, or still going after just the genuine scumbags (and the people the operators honestly mistake for genuine scumbags), rather than waiting until the machine is well oiled, armored, and compeletely out of control.
If Marsh really wants to demonstrate that he realizes that he made a mistake, and that he has switched sides, all he has to do is to publicly announce that he has deployed Linux in a manner not covered by the license.
It's too late now. He's on SCO's hook.
And if he thinks his troubles are just bad PR with his user community he STILL doesn't understand what's going on.
Before he signed up, the only hold SCO had over him was the specter of possible future suits for unauthorized copying.
Now they have his company's signature on a contract, which acknowledges SCO's claims of ownership of the code and its applicability to Linux. Unlike other Linux users, EV1 has now contracted to pay SCO for all its Linux boxes.
If EV1 deploys on boxes beyond those for which it bought a license, SCO gets to bill them, and sue if they don't pay up. Since EV1 already acknowledged SCO's claims by buying the licenses in the first place, they have no leg to stand on in court.
Don't forget:
- defense of victims against robbers, burglars, muggers, rapists,...
- construction and maintainence of roads and bridges
- maintainence (especially fire-protection) of old-growth forests and waterways
With little hope for legislative help from the Republican puppet government in Austin, they spun off TVS.
That seems an odd position to take, given that it's the Republican FCC commissioner that keeps pushing for the legalization of competition in communications, and fighting off the courts when they try to turn it back.
The local electric co-op, Trinity Valley Electric, had a phone subsidiary, Trinity Valley Services. [...] Last month, we got a note in the mail that TVS was now "Cedar Valley Communications", and no longer directly affiliated with TVEC. [...] Now, it makes sense. With an 8-1 decision in the works, TVEC/TVS must have known that they were about to get hammered by Texas law.
That doesn't make sense either. As another poster has already pointed out, the Supreme Court decision was against GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS (cities, townships, counties, etc.) running phone companies. A Co-op is a corporation with its customers as its stockholders - as strictly private eneterprise as any other corportation. Unless TVE is a misledingly-misnamed government entity the ruling would not apply to it.
When we moved to [TVE's] service area last summer, I was exctatic to be out of the grasp of the scandal-plagued monopoly [bucorp] I'd been forced to buy power from before.
As far as scandal-plauging, there are few scandals to equal the routine operation of nearly ANY government operation. I, for one, am more than happy to see the big government, now that it's broken up the national telephone monopoly (a creature of its own regulation), telling the little governments to dump their own creatures.
To anyone who lives in a region with its own city phone service, who believes that their service is good and wants to keep it that way, I have this suggestion:
Go to the legislature of the governmental body that runs the little tellco (i.e. city council or whatever) and suggest they spin it out as a coop. (This will preserve much of its structure, and give the customers even more say in its operation than they had as citizens of the parent governmental division.)
If you don't do this, expect your government to sell it to the local corporate-behemoth tellco at a kickback-driven bargan price - which will be paid off at compound interest in your next telephone bills.
One problem with twisted pair is that the twisting is what gives the pair its impedence. If you change the number of twists, you change the impedence.
Actually, what gives it its characteristic impedence is the stray inductance and capacatance. Increasing the twisting increases both, and thus lowers the impedence. But thickening the insulation, thus moving the wires apart, reduces it, as does changing to an insulation with a lower permittivity. Wire size changes without proportional chanes in spacing also affect the impedence.
Net result is you can get the impedence you want with any given twist rate by adjusting the insulation appropriately.
The important things about twist rates are:
- Twist rates of each pair must be DIFFERENT from that of its neighbors (so crosstalk cancels out on the average).
- Twisting must be uniform and regular.
- Twists should be short compared to the wavelength of the signal (so that you don't get a bunch of uncanceled cross-coupling, especially at the ends of the parallel runs). So tighter twisting is needed for high-speed data than for audio.
This is why it is important to make sure cable buildouts don't have kinks in them. The kink causes an impedence mismatch in the middle of the run, which causes signal reflections, which tend to piss off the receiver.
Kinks bring the wire closer to its neighbor, and to further sections of itself, which lowers the impedence. A local discontinuity reflects some of the signal back toward the transmitter - not much problem by itself. But TWO (or more) of 'em produce a delayed echo - like a ghost on a TV screen - at the receiver and that DOES cause lots of trouble.
Similar problems can happen in coax, but [....]
Main problem with a kink in a coax - even after you do your best to straighten it out - is that the center conductor ends up much closer to the outer shield, creating a BIG local mismatch.
The connectors are probably the biggest cause of impedence mismatches.
Especially since the designers of the connectors didn't, until maybe recently, really focus on keeping the impedence constant for the whole run through the connector. A sub-milimeter discontinuity wasn't a big deal at 100 MHz - but it's like a half-silvered mirror at 3 GHz.
How about rigid coax or waveguide to the curb?:)
Again, if you're going to dig from the house to the curb, why not just bury some fiber? That way you don't need to dig again for decades, rather than years.
Excuse me, but all current flows on the outside of the conductor, the only time you get an inside current is when you have a hollow pipe for instance, then current flows on both surfaces inside and outside,
Absolutely not true.
At DC the current will be evenly distributed throughout a uniform conductor. When the current suddenly changes the change occurs on the surface first, and propagates inward. If it changes gradually - like at low audio rates for small conductors - this propagation time is essentially nonexistent in comparison, so the result is essentially the same as with DC - though there IS enough skin effect to make a difference even at 60 Hz in really long power transmission lines. (That's why you see them in bundles of conductors - approximating a pipe, i.e. "just the skin" - rather than heavier and more expensive single runs of fatter wire.)
The ELECTRIC FIELD, on the other hand, is essentially zero except at the surface (or penetrating somewhat into the surface during rapid current changes). Perhaps that's what you're thinking of.
(It can also be argued that the ENERGY is transmitteded entirely in the space BETWEEN the wires - or ALMOST entirely for high-frequency AC, again because the skin effect allows some transverse electric field to exist within the conductor. But that's a separate issue.)
This latest isn't the same phone lines but it is still copper wiring and find this very impressive.
But if you have to dig up the yard or string a new overhead wire, why the HELL would you string COPPER? You can string glass for the same price and get data rates so far beyond ANYTHING you can push through a couple hundred feet of copper that there's just no comparison.
"Downloading the (whole) internet" would potentially be more than a marketing joke.
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of another reason why the Republicans would be opposed to this: it would allow the Census Bureau to come up with a more accurate count of the populations of lower-class urban neighborhoods, which tend to vote Democratic. This may give the Democrats more seats in the House of Representatives.
Not if it also identified the ones that were ineligible to vote (felons, illegals) and eliminated them from the electorate.
Maybe it's me, but that article was waay too long winded to state the obvious: As long as Microsoft canturn a profit after any sort of penalities given them, they have no motovation to comply to any sort of antitrust regulation.
Close. But you missed the point of part of the wind: That complying with the rulings COSTS Microsoft more than the fines.
So it itsn't just that the fines are too little to matter. It's that COMPLIANCE is TOO EXPENSIVE, and the fines are too small to shift that balance.
Just like alcohol prohibition and the "War on Drugs", it's explicitly PROFITABLE to DISOBEY the rulings.
Of course this brings up a question:
Does this behavior make Microsoft a "Continuing Criminal Enterprise"?
If so, it could be VERY interesting if that's brought up the NEXT time somebody brings Microsoft in for antitrust or other violations.
I wonder if the RICO laws could be applied, too.
This reminds me of the scene in the movie, where Ed Norton's character explains that if it is cheaper for a company to pay fines, than to recall a potentially-deadly product, then they will opt for the former.
But that's the way it's SUPPOSED to be.
The company is in business solely to maximize profit. This makes it's behavior fit the definition of psychopathy/sociopathy - like about one/three percent of the population.
The government is in business to co-opt vigilantism by providing a coherent and understandable set of rules, including punishments for non-compliance that:
- convince most psychopaths/sociopaths that their best interests are served by following the rules, and
- taking out of circulation any that don't follow the rules, once it becomes clear that they won't follow them.
If the fines and other sanctions are low enough that businesses find it more profitable to be scofflaws than law-abiding, it's the fault of the GOVERNMENT, according its own legal theories.
You can defeat this plot by putting the homeless person in a microwave.
Yeah, but you need a microwave big enough for twenty of them.
Wasn't the punchline of that one that every fourth load had to be 19 of 'em plus one Italian?
Polling shows it'll play well in the midwest.
Yes, I know that you're continuing the political propaganda ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H alleged joke.
But, no, polling does not show it would play well in the midwest. Or with the right wing - especially the Christian Right. Even a trial balloon on this subject would result in a guaranteed loss for Bush in the next election.
FYI: There is nobody more rabidly opposed to implanted RFID tracking devices than a Christian Fundamentalist. While right-wingers in general are suspicious of programs that invade personal privacy (since they are perceived as mostly used, once instituted, by left-wingers to dump on their political enemies), an implanted I.D. chip plays directly into one of the Christian Fundamentalists' hot buttons.
An implanted RFID device is an indellible "mark" transmitting a number - the serial number of the device (which is used as an index to an external database of personal information) and/or any stored information (which is also encoded as a binary string, i.e. a number).
According to a Christian Fundamentalist, tagging people with a government-mandated indelible identification number is applying the "Mark of the Beast". (See the Book of Revalations.) The person who would cause that to occur as a government program is the Antichrist, it happens as the end times and final battle are approaching, anybody who lets it happen to him has signed up with the wrong side, etc.
This opposition to anything even approximating applying a number to people, especially if related to financial transactions (which includes aid programs) is SO strong that it has been a problem even during the rollouts of Social Security, the Income Tax, credit cards, ATM debit cards, and online banking services.
Bush and his administration have been clueless enough to do a number of things to tweak off their electoral base. But mandating an implanted I.D. number in the face of this well-known (on the right) hotbutton issue would be cluelessness far beyond the pale. Essentially ALL of his advisors would be SCREAMING at him if he gave the SLIGHTEST sign of being in favor of such a scheme.
Which is why you KNOW this is another (literally) damned April Fool joke.
Or, of course, ISPs could just multicast-enable their networks.
Right now they have little incentive - because enabling multicast for anything but distribution of their own "content" is perceived by ISPs as an added cost that provides them with no new revenue. So ISPs have an incentive not to enable it (or not to enable it generally even if it's on for themselves) while independent net-casters are stuck buying fat pipes to separately transmit streams to each customer - limiting their potential audience to the few they can afford to feed, and thus limiting their load on the ISPs.
But consider what happens with a broad adoption of a cooperative, peer-to-peer, flooding-protocol broadcast workaround:
- The listeners are now using their otherwise unused uplink to forward and fork the stream.
- The broadcaster's potential audience is no longer limited by the size of his feed - so it can expand without limit, just as if multicast were enabled.
- The load on the ISP is the same as if the broadcaster had to give each of his customers a separate unicast feed - but FAR higher than if multicast were used. (And it's harder to manage because it originates diffusely, both throughout the ISP's customer base and incoming from multiple external sources.)
Now the ISP gets the NxUnicast load ANYHOW. This gives him a strong financial incentive to enable multicast - even for external originators - and try to move his users to it.
If the application can detect, and automatically use, multicast when/where it's available, it will provide an INSTANT reward to the ISP for enabling multicast. Even if the program originated outside his network, the peer-to-peer links within it would be multicast, producing a drastic cut in his traffic. (The application could easily have multiple multicast islands connected by unicast links - and even adjust the routing to merge multicast islands and minimize back-and-forth unicast routes connecting them.) The forward-looking ISP gets lowered costs, his competition still pays. Market advantage. So once one adopts it, the rest either stampeed with him or get hit in the pocketbook and left in the dust.
Turning on multicast is a win-win for the ISP (who gets lower costs and better system utilization) and his customers (who get much lower latency when the stream is delivered by multicast than by many unicast hops.) This gives the application authors an incentive to include opportunistic-multicast and the users to prefer a multicast-capable solution over a unicast-only first cut.
= = = = = =
The original article may have been an April Fool joke. But it has pointed out a solution to one of our big problems. A peer-to-peer streaming broadcast application, combining the usenet flooding algorithm and voluntary-link-subscription approach with dynamic configuration ala Bit Torrent and opportunistic multicast will provide:
- a useful service under current ISP policies
- a built-in, seamless and automatic, migration path to a better solution, and
- an evolutionary selection pressure on ISPs to implement it.
Is this the same thing/similar to what they did in the mid 90's with the "Common Hardware Reference Platform"? The idea was a common set of (PowerPC-based) chips, support chips, firmware, drivers, etc. covering everything (in theory) from desktops to embedded systems. What? You don't remember that? Worked well, didn't it.
Reminds me of Sun's SPARC archetecture. This was supposed to be used in everything from the top-end processors to little embedded thingies, using different performance silicon but a common instruction set. And it was supposed to be open.
You don't hear much about that either, do you?
So how about putting a fuel cell in a little black brick with a power-brick cord on it, for the rest of us?
Plug it into your ORDINARY laptop and compute until you run out of gas (or vodka or whatever).
Or plug it into anything else that needs a few watts.
Yes it's not as convenient as having it IN the laptop. But it also puts a bunch of the heat and all the exhaust water somwehere other than my lap. And it doesn't limit my between-fill sessions to the size of the tank I can fit into the laptop.
And like trailer-tow vehicle vs. RV (the former being cheaper long-term because you don't have to throw out the house when the powertrain wears out), the laptop might well need replacing (through obsolescence or breakage) long before the fuel cell became unusable. (Or vice-versa, if the fuel cell becomes poisoned.)
While we're at it, how about a killowatt-level one that runs on odorized propane and mounts in the side of that trailer, next to (or integrated with) the water heater, propane refrigerator, and/or furnace? (Killowatt so I can run the air conditioner "in the wild" - something just beyond a trialer-roof full of current-tech solar panels.)
Building a dedicated fuel cell into a particluar model of laptop strikes me as gratuitous short-sightedness (though slightly more convenient as a laptop than a two-piece model).
(Now if this were Sony I'd expect them to be playing status games, with the high-end maximally-overpriced laptop having a larger tank than the next one down (at a cost differential FAR beyond any manufacturing cost times markup difference), and brick-chargers (in ugly bricks) for their less-well-heeled customers.)
You mean unlike today, where anything we build now will be payed for by our grandchildren. :-)
Actually it gets paid for a couple times by us and several more times by our grandchildren.
The resources spent on a project run on borrowed or printed money are resources that aren't available for other purposes - and thus drive up the price of that category of goods. Money "borrowed" by inflating the currency is value sucked out of the dollars and dollar-denominated resources held by the general population - yet the government pays off the "debt" to the central bank, with interest, from future taxes.
I could go on.
I saw details of one of the licenses, and AFAICC they do not have to pay SCO anything in the future for using Linux if Linux contains no SCO code.
But SCO is currently claiming that ALL code working to Unix-related interfaces (including such things as all clients of errno.h) are derived works and thus "SCO code".
But, if the parent is true, then EV1 and SCO should lose their rights under the GPL.
Good point.
the reason the Justice department is arguing against co-op broadband systems is then his big business buddies in the telecom and cable industry don't get paid...
That's an interesting interpretation.
Especially given that they're NOT arguing aginst broadband operated by co-ops. (Which, by the way, the explicitly support, along with broadband supplied by other little companies, even if it competes with their "big business buddies".)
They're arguing against broadband companies run by county and local GOVERNMENTS. And even then they're only arguing against them when they're implemented in violation of the objections of the STATE governments from which the smaller governments derive their powers and mandates.
The issue was STRICTLY whether an FCC regulation allowing "any entity" to operate a broadband company free of state regulation could be used by cities, counties, and the like, as arms of their state, to escape control by their state legislatures and constitutions.
But of course certain rabid Bush-haters just LOVE to lie about it, claiming that the Bush administration is trying to block small broadband carriers, rather than to block governments from squeezing them out, with tax-subsidized unfair competition and conflict-of-interest driven regulatory roadblocks against any little guy that wants to compete with THEIR operation.
Prostitution (in the UK) isn't de facto illegal like it is in the states, is it?
Note that in Nevada it is explicitly legal - though subject to zoning laws.
Such a contract would likely be legal there. (Though no in Las Vegas proper, which is not zoned for sex industry.)
Um, but what if we don't trust you?
Then make your own choices and take your chances with the fallout from them. Just don't expect me to take the consequences of your choices, too.
And don't say I didn't warn you.
We wouldn't have to rent a clue if you'd provide some real indication that you were offering us one for free. Please provide us that indication. I, for one, would like to get it right.
What you appear to be doing is asking me to identify myself, my family, my friends, and my acquaintences, on a very large and very open forum, and tell you - and everybody listening, potentially including exactly the totally-information-aware security agencies in question - all of our stories about every time some authority figure dumped on us and/or got a bee in his bonnet about one or more of us being the bad guys.
Given that the subject at hand is the way such authority has been used (especially MISused) historically, I trust you'll understand if I decline to hand out such anaecdotal data on a platter. (If nothing else, it wouldn't be consistent with my argument to do so, would it? B-) )
So you'll have to make your own judgements about MY judgement and/or about the underlying problem.
Regarding my judgement: I've made over 1900 slashdot postings under this handle. Look up a few and see what you think.
Regarding external evidence: Follow some of the leads I've given you (like COINTELPRO), or consult any person who has taken postgraduate courses in history.
(Meanwhile, I WILL mention that my handle {Ungrounded Lightning Rod} is a reference to this very issue - and a previous employer's request that his employees, while posting to Usenet, try to avoid becoming lightning rods for controversy that might reflect poorly {sideflash?} on the company. B-) I'm willing to talk about it in person, and I'm not blackmailable by threats to expose a connection between my personal identity and some handle. And I don't encrypt or obfuscate routing on the traffic I use to post, so security agencies can identify me easily if they ever feel like it. I simply make it a policy, when posting under a handle, not to identify myself, or confirm or deny speculation, in an online setting.)
They get to know your location on a precise time and date.
Don't forget while you're there to only pay in plain cash. If you use a credit card or a check, then they'll know you were there either.
Don't forget to take the battery out of your cell phone. Otherwise it will tell them (about every five minutes if they don't explicitly ask it for more reports), exactly where you are.
On the other side, we have people wielding Orwell. Big Brother is watching you, the government is evil and corrupt, you can't take a piss off-center without a dozen people knowing about it. Here's a hypothetical story I made up, complete with a series of lottery-scale unlikely events, leading to a conclusion that mostly just serves make you scared of your own shadow.
Rent a clue.
The Orwellian scenarios sound like a bunch of pipe-dreaming by paranoids to you because they haven't happened to you.
Yet.
But trust me. They do happen. They happen a lot.
They've happened to me. They've happened to lots of my friends. They've happened to my wife. They've happened to a number of our ancestors. (On her side, at least one per generation for the last three, and that's just counting the ones on the DIRECT line.)
They happened to opposition political figures big time, over and over. Not just in countries "over there" - but right here at home. (Look up the FBI's "COINTELPRO" just for starters.) Every twenty years or so the stuff that happened twenty years back comes to light. And the story is always the same: "That was THEN. That COULDN'T happen NOW." And twenty years later you find out that it WAS happening now, too.
j'accuse is alive and well, as is stereotyping, as is guilt-by-association, and so on.
The conspiracy-theory tinfoil-hat stereotype is VERY convenient for the people who are actually running such operations. It discredits their victims's cries for help, as well as the warnings of those who haven't yet been vicitmized (as far as they can tell) but who understand the dynamics and can thus read the writing on the wall.
The biggest trouble with these things is that, by the time they come for YOU, it's too late. So you have to head them off while they're still being formed up, or still going after just the genuine scumbags (and the people the operators honestly mistake for genuine scumbags), rather than waiting until the machine is well oiled, armored, and compeletely out of control.
If Marsh really wants to demonstrate that he realizes that he made a mistake, and that he has switched sides, all he has to do is to publicly announce that he has deployed Linux in a manner not covered by the license.
It's too late now. He's on SCO's hook.
And if he thinks his troubles are just bad PR with his user community he STILL doesn't understand what's going on.
Before he signed up, the only hold SCO had over him was the specter of possible future suits for unauthorized copying.
Now they have his company's signature on a contract, which acknowledges SCO's claims of ownership of the code and its applicability to Linux. Unlike other Linux users, EV1 has now contracted to pay SCO for all its Linux boxes.
If EV1 deploys on boxes beyond those for which it bought a license, SCO gets to bill them, and sue if they don't pay up. Since EV1 already acknowledged SCO's claims by buying the licenses in the first place, they have no leg to stand on in court.
Is anyone else here tired of MS whipping out the ol' TCO everytime an open source product kicks their product's ass?
From the article:
License cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership
First rule of FUD: Doesn't matter if an argument is true. If they believe it, keep pushing it.
The Republican FCC ca[me] out strong against the little guy in this case as you can see in the first two paragraphs of the Court's decision.
The little guy in this case was a group of rural counties.
Which is exactly the position I'd expect him to take in this case.
Since when is a government, at any level, the "little guy"?
If it's "spin it out as a coop", where the hell were you and the other subscribers when the coop board that bumped the rates was elected?
Oops. I misred your comment, conflating it with the flames above. Sorry 'bout that.
I take it your local government sold the cable off to a big fish, who's now lining his pockets. Right?
They already did that with the local cable company. Rates are up 80% since.
Which "that" - spin it out as a coop, or sell it to a big player?
If it's "sell it to a big player", that's what happens if you DON'T complain.
If it's "spin it out as a coop", where the hell were you and the other subscribers when the coop board that bumped the rates was elected?
Don't forget: ...
- defense of victims against robbers, burglars, muggers, rapists,
- construction and maintainence of roads and bridges
- maintainence (especially fire-protection) of old-growth forests and waterways
I could go on for pages. B-(
With little hope for legislative help from the Republican puppet government in Austin, they spun off TVS.
That seems an odd position to take, given that it's the Republican FCC commissioner that keeps pushing for the legalization of competition in communications, and fighting off the courts when they try to turn it back.
The local electric co-op, Trinity Valley Electric, had a phone subsidiary, Trinity Valley Services. [...] Last month, we got a note in the mail that TVS was now "Cedar Valley Communications", and no longer directly affiliated with TVEC. [...] Now, it makes sense. With an 8-1 decision in the works, TVEC/TVS must have known that they were about to get hammered by Texas law.
That doesn't make sense either. As another poster has already pointed out, the Supreme Court decision was against GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS (cities, townships, counties, etc.) running phone companies. A Co-op is a corporation with its customers as its stockholders - as strictly private eneterprise as any other corportation. Unless TVE is a misledingly-misnamed government entity the ruling would not apply to it.
When we moved to [TVE's] service area last summer, I was exctatic to be out of the grasp of the scandal-plagued monopoly [bucorp] I'd been forced to buy power from before.
As far as scandal-plauging, there are few scandals to equal the routine operation of nearly ANY government operation. I, for one, am more than happy to see the big government, now that it's broken up the national telephone monopoly (a creature of its own regulation), telling the little governments to dump their own creatures.
To anyone who lives in a region with its own city phone service, who believes that their service is good and wants to keep it that way, I have this suggestion:
Go to the legislature of the governmental body that runs the little tellco (i.e. city council or whatever) and suggest they spin it out as a coop. (This will preserve much of its structure, and give the customers even more say in its operation than they had as citizens of the parent governmental division.)
If you don't do this, expect your government to sell it to the local corporate-behemoth tellco at a kickback-driven bargan price - which will be paid off at compound interest in your next telephone bills.
One problem with twisted pair is that the twisting is what gives the pair its impedence. If you change the number of twists, you change the impedence.
:)
Actually, what gives it its characteristic impedence is the stray inductance and capacatance. Increasing the twisting increases both, and thus lowers the impedence. But thickening the insulation, thus moving the wires apart, reduces it, as does changing to an insulation with a lower permittivity. Wire size changes without proportional chanes in spacing also affect the impedence.
Net result is you can get the impedence you want with any given twist rate by adjusting the insulation appropriately.
The important things about twist rates are:
- Twist rates of each pair must be DIFFERENT from that of its neighbors (so crosstalk cancels out on the average).
- Twisting must be uniform and regular.
- Twists should be short compared to the wavelength of the signal (so that you don't get a bunch of uncanceled cross-coupling, especially at the ends of the parallel runs).
So tighter twisting is needed for high-speed data than for audio.
This is why it is important to make sure cable buildouts don't have kinks in them. The kink causes an impedence mismatch in the middle of the run, which causes signal reflections, which tend to piss off the receiver.
Kinks bring the wire closer to its neighbor, and to further sections of itself, which lowers the impedence. A local discontinuity reflects some of the signal back toward the transmitter - not much problem by itself. But TWO (or more) of 'em produce a delayed echo - like a ghost on a TV screen - at the receiver and that DOES cause lots of trouble.
Similar problems can happen in coax, but [....]
Main problem with a kink in a coax - even after you do your best to straighten it out - is that the center conductor ends up much closer to the outer shield, creating a BIG local mismatch.
The connectors are probably the biggest cause of impedence mismatches.
Especially since the designers of the connectors didn't, until maybe recently, really focus on keeping the impedence constant for the whole run through the connector. A sub-milimeter discontinuity wasn't a big deal at 100 MHz - but it's like a half-silvered mirror at 3 GHz.
How about rigid coax or waveguide to the curb?
Again, if you're going to dig from the house to the curb, why not just bury some fiber? That way you don't need to dig again for decades, rather than years.
Excuse me, but all current flows on the outside of the conductor, the only time you get an inside current is when you have a hollow pipe for instance, then current flows on both surfaces inside and outside,
Absolutely not true.
At DC the current will be evenly distributed throughout a uniform conductor. When the current suddenly changes the change occurs on the surface first, and propagates inward. If it changes gradually - like at low audio rates for small conductors - this propagation time is essentially nonexistent in comparison, so the result is essentially the same as with DC - though there IS enough skin effect to make a difference even at 60 Hz in really long power transmission lines. (That's why you see them in bundles of conductors - approximating a pipe, i.e. "just the skin" - rather than heavier and more expensive single runs of fatter wire.)
The ELECTRIC FIELD, on the other hand, is essentially zero except at the surface (or penetrating somewhat into the surface during rapid current changes). Perhaps that's what you're thinking of.
(It can also be argued that the ENERGY is transmitteded entirely in the space BETWEEN the wires - or ALMOST entirely for high-frequency AC, again because the skin effect allows some transverse electric field to exist within the conductor. But that's a separate issue.)
This latest isn't the same phone lines but it is still copper wiring and find this very impressive.
But if you have to dig up the yard or string a new overhead wire, why the HELL would you string COPPER? You can string glass for the same price and get data rates so far beyond ANYTHING you can push through a couple hundred feet of copper that there's just no comparison.
"Downloading the (whole) internet" would potentially be more than a marketing joke.