Google's system for making sure their ads are relavant is to kill any ad, no mather how much money is behind it, if it fails to meet an unpublished click-to-impression ratio. This is pitched as a win-win situation to the sponsors, they're told that their ad wasn't as effective as they wanted and given hints to write a better one.
What exactly would your WiFi be connected to anyway? Besides, Bluetooth would be good enough to cover your whole row with the present size of airline seats.
Cell phone technology is based in part by determining which tower can hit you with the strongest signal, as each tower represents a 3-8 mile block of space.
When you're 50,000 feet in the air, you're 8 miles off the ground, and usually moving at a pretty nice rate of speed as well. Will cellular towers be able to properly figure out which tower should be handling the call, and properly do the tower-to-tower handoffs we take for granted when moving down the highway?
I always thought that the no-cell-phones-in-the-sky rules were not just to protect the plane from the unlikely but deadly random autopilot interference, but also to protect the cell networks on the ground from what would be sure to be frequent confusing situations.
Yes, the law requires a free entry, but this kind of giveaway makes it real easy to drown it out.
We haven't seen the official rules yet, but what I expect the free entry method to be will be to send a 3x5 inch card with your name and mailing and indicating which hour's drawing you want to be entered for to an address in Redmond. There will likely be a limit one mail-in card per hourly drawing, which will equate to the one entry that online users will get for showing up on the service during that hour. Cards must be handwritten, no printed cards accepted.
But, the catch is that if you want to enter all 24 drawings in a day, you'll need to seperately mail 24 envelopes with single cards in them. Afterall, 37 cent stamps are paid to the United States Postal Service and not Microsoft.
Still, spending $62.16 to enter all of the drawings in a week seems a bit unwise, because you'll only be allowed to win one $1,000 if you win at all. Lottery tickets would be a better use of that money.
Actually, the real contest won't need to do this. The winners will all already be paying customers of MSN's paid service, so MSN will already have a valid address to send physical paperwork to. However, this contest seems very ill-advised because a scam that follows the method in the parent post will just be too easy to pull..
You forgot about the fact that a radio transmitter always needs power, and so does a hard drive. Batteries will only get you so far, these servers won't last forever. So, how are you going to connect to power without getting attention?
Moreover, once the coffeeshop notices that there is a spike in upload traffic constantly even when they're closed, they'll know somethings up. It won't be too hard to find this device, afterall, it has to emit a signal somehow.
If you buy white flour from somebody claiming it is cocaine, you haven't committed a crime. However, somebody who wanted to try to accuse you of being a regular buyer of cocaine can use the fact that you tried to buy cocaine, and anything you might have done or said in the process of buying that flour that you were convinced was cocaine.
Besides, shooting down this lawsuit is a rather simple thing. Just show the judge your smartcard-based door entry system or whatever legal thing you did use the programmer for, and summit sworn testimony under penality of perjury that you've never hacked DirecTV. Simple enough things to do if you're innocent. If you're not, you shouldn't be winning this lawsuit anyway!
Do you buy goods from stores that tell you what they're selling you is illegal to possess because its only useful purpose is illegal?
Yeah, even though that turned out to be untrue statement, these people still purchased their smartcard devices (which you somehow are assuming all of them intended to use legally in some non-DirecTV use or not use at all...) from a vendor that displayed that kind of information. That's a very foolish thing to do if you don't want to be fighting a lawsuit.
You're free to sue anybody for anything, welcome to the United States of America. Oh, no promise you'll win, but you're welcome to try.
If this lawsuit truely is baseless, then the defendants should have no problem showing that they have a non-DirecTV-stealing use for Smartcard equipment, and that this whole thing is a joke. If they do that sucessfully, then DirecTV will be paying them for their trouble. The problem you're going to find here is that most of the defendants are going to not be able to meet that standard, in part because they did exactly what theyr'e being accussed of.
Yes, but on the other hand buying something from this vendor gives a big clue on how it will be used. All one needs to do to get rid of these charges is to bring some shread of proof for their legit use of a smartcard system, and DirecTV gets laughed out of court. Unfortunately, DirecTV is going to turn out to be right much more often than it is wrong.
Which is why it seems like the system is working here. Those who did use the devise illegally can't hide, those who were wrongly caught on the list simply need to bring some proof of their legit use to court to win. "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply here, this isn't a criminal case, it's a civil case...
And then the hotel's contacted by the RIAA... and the hotel realizes the IP address in question was assigned to their WiFi system. They route that address's traffic to the bit bucket, and there's no need to even find the laptop.
The RIAA dragnet is for uploaders because their theory is if they can scare people out of sharing, the non-sharing freeloaders will saturate the remaining uploaders so that the file-sharing network will cease to be useful.
But the coffee shop isn't the idea place to even set up a transient P2P sever. The P2P share would only exist when the laptop user is at the bookstore, which won't be that often to begin with. Any transfer in progress when the laptop user leaves the store will get aborted. Smart coffee shop owners have ADSL behind these shares, because they're expecting browsers not servers, so the upload speed won't be that pretty anyway.
This isn't a technology worth banning, it's not gonna be that useful to file-swappers in the first place!
Digital Reader Management... they want to annoy users to the maximum possible so people just assume they wrote a decent paper on the topic without actually reading the whole thing to check.
Yep, you can transmit on the broadcast frequencies without a license so long as your transmitter stays under the approprate power limit. Just a warning: There's a reason why they call it flea power.
Of course, you'd likely get much cleaner results from a set of 900MHz headphones that you can buy at nearly any electronics store for $100... but if it's the fun of the hack you want you can go right ahead.
And the distance between those four cities is kinda the point. You as a listener can hear all four stations pretty well in your car in Seattle, but none of the four actually have their transmitters there. If you were standing next to any of the four stations towers, you'd likely hear just that station and the other three would be wiped out by the.5 MHz signal bleed, combined with the fact that you'd be quite a disatance from any of the three other stations.
That's how the.5 MHz bleed and the.2 MHz seperation co-exists. The FCC never puts stations that close to each other right next to each other, there's always a noticiable distance between the stations. There plenty of spots where stations.2 MHz overlap, and most radios are good enough to follow the carrier of the station they're tuned to in that situation because there will be a dramatic difference in signal strengths between the two.
They'll be jammed out. Having been caught operating a pirate station is cause to have an LPFM application shut down.
On the flip side, this is the pirate's chance to go legit....
Here's the reason why the big time FM owners are claiming that LPFM interferes but the studies don't back them up. The "protected countour" of an FM signal is not always the same as its actual coverage range. That is to say, some FM radio stations are heard loud and clear in places that the FCC's prediction model doesn't expect them to be, and conversely absent in others. The problem here is simple, a coverage map based on a topographical map will always be inaccurate because no map perfectly maps everything, and pesky things like skyscrapers sometimes have to be taken into account. Broadcasters have better technology, so they do a better job of guessing where their signal will actually go when they request approval for a tower site.
So, FM stations will be able to produce listner complaints that say "I used to live in Wxxx's coverage range, but now some pesky LPFM from 4 towns over is jamming their signal out." The truth is, that listener was never in Wxxx's protected countor, the area where Wxxx has a right to complain to any interference with their signal, because the FCC's prediction system didn't expect Wxxx's signal to be there. So, when the LPFM interjects actual interference into the territory, the maps don't show any problemsome overlap.
In some ways, this is a case of government not keeping up with reality. On the other hand, it's also a case of the FM station owners enjoying signal reach that the law never entitled them to. AM skip works the same way... distant stations can be heard at night when the weather is good, but even the former "clear channel" (lower case, meaning no other station on the same frequency, not the megacompany) stations now face stations on the opposite coast using their frequency and can't complain about being interfered with in those distant cities, just if something is going to bother them in their home territory.
Just because the government lets something be the way it is for years without messing with it doesn't let a business assume it's going to be that way forever. LPFM is a great idea on the chalkboard, but a lot more work than most applicants realize. But, for those who can get it together, let them have the technology...
GoTo.com, Overture's first name, had always displayed Inktomi results even before Yahoo bought them. My guess is that eventually Overture's search interface will vanish and it'll be known solely for its ad-placement business.
Little conspiracy. It's been a long standing tactic in the search engine biz to block searches for one's own competitors. Afterall, using Google to look for Yahoo is asking the search engine a silly question, so why not give back an equally silly question.
Think of it as an easter egg intentionally put into the search engines as a gag...
The interesting irony is that if their results turn into Inktomi with Overture ads on top, that'll be exactly what GoTo.com, the company that eventually renamed itself Overture, was.
Slashdot Mirror
Google's system for making sure their ads are relavant is to kill any ad, no mather how much money is behind it, if it fails to meet an unpublished click-to-impression ratio. This is pitched as a win-win situation to the sponsors, they're told that their ad wasn't as effective as they wanted and given hints to write a better one.
What exactly would your WiFi be connected to anyway? Besides, Bluetooth would be good enough to cover your whole row with the present size of airline seats.
Cell phone technology is based in part by determining which tower can hit you with the strongest signal, as each tower represents a 3-8 mile block of space.
When you're 50,000 feet in the air, you're 8 miles off the ground, and usually moving at a pretty nice rate of speed as well. Will cellular towers be able to properly figure out which tower should be handling the call, and properly do the tower-to-tower handoffs we take for granted when moving down the highway?
I always thought that the no-cell-phones-in-the-sky rules were not just to protect the plane from the unlikely but deadly random autopilot interference, but also to protect the cell networks on the ground from what would be sure to be frequent confusing situations.
Yes, the law requires a free entry, but this kind of giveaway makes it real easy to drown it out.
We haven't seen the official rules yet, but what I expect the free entry method to be will be to send a 3x5 inch card with your name and mailing and indicating which hour's drawing you want to be entered for to an address in Redmond. There will likely be a limit one mail-in card per hourly drawing, which will equate to the one entry that online users will get for showing up on the service during that hour. Cards must be handwritten, no printed cards accepted.
But, the catch is that if you want to enter all 24 drawings in a day, you'll need to seperately mail 24 envelopes with single cards in them. Afterall, 37 cent stamps are paid to the United States Postal Service and not Microsoft.
Still, spending $62.16 to enter all of the drawings in a week seems a bit unwise, because you'll only be allowed to win one $1,000 if you win at all. Lottery tickets would be a better use of that money.
Actually, the real contest won't need to do this. The winners will all already be paying customers of MSN's paid service, so MSN will already have a valid address to send physical paperwork to. However, this contest seems very ill-advised because a scam that follows the method in the parent post will just be too easy to pull..
If you're going to be given a prize greater than $600, the prize giver must collect your SS#... and then send it to the tax man.
Yep, if you're willing to face the abuse of process charges for the cases you lose, there's really nothing stopping you.
You forgot about the fact that a radio transmitter always needs power, and so does a hard drive. Batteries will only get you so far, these servers won't last forever. So, how are you going to connect to power without getting attention?
Moreover, once the coffeeshop notices that there is a spike in upload traffic constantly even when they're closed, they'll know somethings up. It won't be too hard to find this device, afterall, it has to emit a signal somehow.
If you buy white flour from somebody claiming it is cocaine, you haven't committed a crime. However, somebody who wanted to try to accuse you of being a regular buyer of cocaine can use the fact that you tried to buy cocaine, and anything you might have done or said in the process of buying that flour that you were convinced was cocaine.
Besides, shooting down this lawsuit is a rather simple thing. Just show the judge your smartcard-based door entry system or whatever legal thing you did use the programmer for, and summit sworn testimony under penality of perjury that you've never hacked DirecTV. Simple enough things to do if you're innocent. If you're not, you shouldn't be winning this lawsuit anyway!
Do you buy goods from stores that tell you what they're selling you is illegal to possess because its only useful purpose is illegal?
Yeah, even though that turned out to be untrue statement, these people still purchased their smartcard devices (which you somehow are assuming all of them intended to use legally in some non-DirecTV use or not use at all...) from a vendor that displayed that kind of information. That's a very foolish thing to do if you don't want to be fighting a lawsuit.
You're free to sue anybody for anything, welcome to the United States of America. Oh, no promise you'll win, but you're welcome to try.
If this lawsuit truely is baseless, then the defendants should have no problem showing that they have a non-DirecTV-stealing use for Smartcard equipment, and that this whole thing is a joke. If they do that sucessfully, then DirecTV will be paying them for their trouble. The problem you're going to find here is that most of the defendants are going to not be able to meet that standard, in part because they did exactly what theyr'e being accussed of.
Yes, but on the other hand buying something from this vendor gives a big clue on how it will be used. All one needs to do to get rid of these charges is to bring some shread of proof for their legit use of a smartcard system, and DirecTV gets laughed out of court. Unfortunately, DirecTV is going to turn out to be right much more often than it is wrong.
Which is why it seems like the system is working here. Those who did use the devise illegally can't hide, those who were wrongly caught on the list simply need to bring some proof of their legit use to court to win. "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply here, this isn't a criminal case, it's a civil case...
So they subpeona for your logs and your EULA doesn't mater...
And then the hotel's contacted by the RIAA... and the hotel realizes the IP address in question was assigned to their WiFi system. They route that address's traffic to the bit bucket, and there's no need to even find the laptop.
The interesting thing here... it's easier to operate a hit and run spam server than to operate a hit and run P2P server...
This is just plain over before it started...
The RIAA dragnet is for uploaders because their theory is if they can scare people out of sharing, the non-sharing freeloaders will saturate the remaining uploaders so that the file-sharing network will cease to be useful.
But the coffee shop isn't the idea place to even set up a transient P2P sever. The P2P share would only exist when the laptop user is at the bookstore, which won't be that often to begin with. Any transfer in progress when the laptop user leaves the store will get aborted. Smart coffee shop owners have ADSL behind these shares, because they're expecting browsers not servers, so the upload speed won't be that pretty anyway.
This isn't a technology worth banning, it's not gonna be that useful to file-swappers in the first place!
Digital Reader Management... they want to annoy users to the maximum possible so people just assume they wrote a decent paper on the topic without actually reading the whole thing to check.
Yep, you can transmit on the broadcast frequencies without a license so long as your transmitter stays under the approprate power limit. Just a warning: There's a reason why they call it flea power.
Of course, you'd likely get much cleaner results from a set of 900MHz headphones that you can buy at nearly any electronics store for $100... but if it's the fun of the hack you want you can go right ahead.
Seattle area has that - 104.3, 104.5, 104.7, 104.9 . Just noticed that last night.
.5 MHz signal bleed, combined with the fact that you'd be quite a disatance from any of the three other stations.
.5 MHz bleed and the .2 MHz seperation co-exists. The FCC never puts stations that close to each other right next to each other, there's always a noticiable distance between the stations. There plenty of spots where stations .2 MHz overlap, and most radios are good enough to follow the carrier of the station they're tuned to in that situation because there will be a dramatic difference in signal strengths between the two.
What you're actually hearing as far as I can tell is:
104.3 KAFE Bellingham
104.5 KMIH Mercer Island
104.7 KEEH Spokane
104.9 KFNK Eatonvile
And the distance between those four cities is kinda the point. You as a listener can hear all four stations pretty well in your car in Seattle, but none of the four actually have their transmitters there. If you were standing next to any of the four stations towers, you'd likely hear just that station and the other three would be wiped out by the
That's how the
They'll be jammed out. Having been caught operating a pirate station is cause to have an LPFM application shut down. On the flip side, this is the pirate's chance to go legit....
Here's the reason why the big time FM owners are claiming that LPFM interferes but the studies don't back them up. The "protected countour" of an FM signal is not always the same as its actual coverage range. That is to say, some FM radio stations are heard loud and clear in places that the FCC's prediction model doesn't expect them to be, and conversely absent in others. The problem here is simple, a coverage map based on a topographical map will always be inaccurate because no map perfectly maps everything, and pesky things like skyscrapers sometimes have to be taken into account. Broadcasters have better technology, so they do a better job of guessing where their signal will actually go when they request approval for a tower site.
So, FM stations will be able to produce listner complaints that say "I used to live in Wxxx's coverage range, but now some pesky LPFM from 4 towns over is jamming their signal out." The truth is, that listener was never in Wxxx's protected countor, the area where Wxxx has a right to complain to any interference with their signal, because the FCC's prediction system didn't expect Wxxx's signal to be there. So, when the LPFM interjects actual interference into the territory, the maps don't show any problemsome overlap.
In some ways, this is a case of government not keeping up with reality. On the other hand, it's also a case of the FM station owners enjoying signal reach that the law never entitled them to. AM skip works the same way... distant stations can be heard at night when the weather is good, but even the former "clear channel" (lower case, meaning no other station on the same frequency, not the megacompany) stations now face stations on the opposite coast using their frequency and can't complain about being interfered with in those distant cities, just if something is going to bother them in their home territory.
Just because the government lets something be the way it is for years without messing with it doesn't let a business assume it's going to be that way forever. LPFM is a great idea on the chalkboard, but a lot more work than most applicants realize. But, for those who can get it together, let them have the technology...
GoTo.com, Overture's first name, had always displayed Inktomi results even before Yahoo bought them. My guess is that eventually Overture's search interface will vanish and it'll be known solely for its ad-placement business.
Little conspiracy. It's been a long standing tactic in the search engine biz to block searches for one's own competitors. Afterall, using Google to look for Yahoo is asking the search engine a silly question, so why not give back an equally silly question.
Think of it as an easter egg intentionally put into the search engines as a gag...
The interesting irony is that if their results turn into Inktomi with Overture ads on top, that'll be exactly what GoTo.com, the company that eventually renamed itself Overture, was.