The way Skype tries to get around NAT seems to be by routing your calls through ultrapeers. This works well if one of your call endpoints are near some, but when I tried (several times) to make a call between Victoria University of Wellington and a friend's place here in Wellington, New Zealand, Skype in its infinite wisdom decided to bounce my calls through Canada or Hong Kong. Which tends to increase latency somewhat.
The reason that Skype has such good audio quality is that it uses a wideband 16KHz audio codec; the telephone network is standardised on an 8KHz sampling rate, so you can't expect to hear anything above 4KHz.
While I'm sure the FireWire interface can cope with 100MB/s, I'm pretty sure the disk in any available iPod can't be written to at anywhere near that speed. So your calculations may be a little bit out.
Do you indicate in any way to the users of your AP that they can use it freely and you don't mind? Or do you just leave it open and assume they they'll assume it's okay?
If you need net access so badly, why not (shock, horror, gasp) pay for it? What's so ethical about saying "I only steal internet access when I absolutely have to check my email"?
I have a pre-pay account with one of the hotspot operators here (CafeNet), and still haven't used all of the credit I put on my account when I signed up a year ago. There are places where I can and do legally get free access; there are places where there's no WiFi. In extreme cases, I may use the horrendously expensive GPRS service, or just go without.
What part of knowing Linux inside & out and being an extremely bright IT professional requires that one must have knowledge of how to keep Microsoft Windows systems running?
Personally, I don't care about Windows' stability as I rarely have to use it. I prefer Unix systems, and don't need to do any software development on Windows as part of my job.
You are of course assuming all illegal acts are equally bad. It's much harder to kill someone with a copy of BitTorrent than with a gun. And I think you'll have some difficulty finding people who seriously believe that large scale copyright infringement is worse than killing one or more people.
I've never seen a DVD which forces you to watch trailers. Is this a regional thing (I live in Region 4) or something that only happens with DVDs of very recent films?
Does the base station run off batteries, though? Or when the power goes out are you left with a cordless phone that is on, but can't talk to the base station because it's off?
There's lots of sci-fi which doesn't spend vast quantities of time talking about mercenaries. I think you'll find that most sci-fi is set in the future, however:-)
Yes, this is also a gross overgeneralisation, but I suspect one more reliable than the parent's.
Isn't it the the fault of the NOC for making the leap of SPEWS listing -> must be evil spammers? Maybe you (or they) should have read whatever contract you had with them more carefully.
This is especially the case when the shipping is cross-border (especially if that border has a lot of water involved); then you may choose to buy from a different online shop because with shipping included they're much cheaper.
I am also perfectly within my rights to subscribe to some idea of what is immoral that disagrees with others:-)
However. My big complaint would be if you took a code-level (function calls and the like) interface and wrapped it with an RPC-style interface specifically for the purpose of insulating yourself from the GPL code, effectively letting you treat it as if it was LGPLed -- making changes for the sole purpose of making it work better with your proprietary software.
So in that case, scenario one is okay, and two and three aren't.
Why? Because I wouldn't want someone to do it with my GPLed code. It would be especially annoying to see some Mac OS X shareware developer take something I'd done, replace the UI with a shiny Mac OS X GUI, and then charge USD15 for using the result.
I'm perfectly within my rights to disagree with the actions of others, legal or otherwise. But you don't have to agree with me:-)
I also don't see any problem with developing a proprietary IDE that uses GCC to compile its code; you're using interfaces provided by GCC's original developers to do that. But to take an existing GPLed app or library, and add an RPC layer to it so that you can use it from within your non-GPLed code which you intend to distribute to others is fairly clearly against the wishes of the copyright holders of that GPLed code; if they'd wanted you to be able to link with their code from your proprietary app, they'd have used the LGPL or some other similar license.
It means that the app *may* *technically* be in compliance with the GPL (but they're scum for doing it like that). Essentially, they will have an executable with the GPL code, and then an executable with their code (and no GPLed stuff), and some way of communicating between the two. This means that they can get away with releasing only the source for the executable with the GPLed code in it, but it's not terribly useful by itself. The Mac OS X IM client Proetus does this, using GAIM's networking code.
Is it GPL compliant? Maybe; the MySQL guys seem to think that talking to their database over the network amounts to "linking", where as most people traditionally have taken this to mean "merging their code with mine in the same executable".
Is it scummy behaviour that should be discouraged? Absolutely.
Flicker isn't a problem. 25fps is slightly more than what movies are projected in (24fps), and I don't see crowds walking out of movie theatres complaining about the awful flicker. And the FPS figures are the frames per second ratings; both PAL and NTSC are interlaced, so the number of vertical scans down your CRT per second is actually double that; one for all the odd-numbered scanlines, and one for all the even-numbered scanlines.
The reason for the different framerates is that PAL countries have 50Hz power, and NTSC countries have 60Hz; the TV framerate is selected to avoid problems caused by beating with the mains power frequency. On modern sets this doesn't seem to be a problem, however.
But people are already trading unDRMed files online. Making legitimate downloads DRMed just makes things more difficult for those of us who are trying to respect copyright law.
Current solutions are designed for distributing large, static files. Most of the traffic of a site like slashdot is 100k dynamic (or at least, frequently changing) HTML. Which means that you're going to be distributing many more objects, with much shorter lifetimes; bittorrent, dijjer, or whatever new scheme someone's thought of this week isn't going to work nearly as well as you'd like.
Slashdot Mirror
The way Skype tries to get around NAT seems to be by routing your calls through ultrapeers. This works well if one of your call endpoints are near some, but when I tried (several times) to make a call between Victoria University of Wellington and a friend's place here in Wellington, New Zealand, Skype in its infinite wisdom decided to bounce my calls through Canada or Hong Kong. Which tends to increase latency somewhat.
The reason that Skype has such good audio quality is that it uses a wideband 16KHz audio codec; the telephone network is standardised on an 8KHz sampling rate, so you can't expect to hear anything above 4KHz.
While I'm sure the FireWire interface can cope with 100MB/s, I'm pretty sure the disk in any available iPod can't be written to at anywhere near that speed. So your calculations may be a little bit out.
Of course, some small bands burn their own CDs and sell them, with colour-laser printed inserts. Nothing illegal about that.
Do you indicate in any way to the users of your AP that they can use it freely and you don't mind? Or do you just leave it open and assume they they'll assume it's okay?
If you need net access so badly, why not (shock, horror, gasp) pay for it? What's so ethical about saying "I only steal internet access when I absolutely have to check my email"?
I have a pre-pay account with one of the hotspot operators here (CafeNet), and still haven't used all of the credit I put on my account when I signed up a year ago. There are places where I can and do legally get free access; there are places where there's no WiFi. In extreme cases, I may use the horrendously expensive GPRS service, or just go without.
What part of knowing Linux inside & out and being an extremely bright IT professional requires that one must have knowledge of how to keep Microsoft Windows systems running?
Personally, I don't care about Windows' stability as I rarely have to use it. I prefer Unix systems, and don't need to do any software development on Windows as part of my job.
You are of course assuming all illegal acts are equally bad. It's much harder to kill someone with a copy of BitTorrent than with a gun. And I think you'll have some difficulty finding people who seriously believe that large scale copyright infringement is worse than killing one or more people.
I've never seen a DVD which forces you to watch trailers. Is this a regional thing (I live in Region 4) or something that only happens with DVDs of very recent films?
I think you meant mourning.
How about vaguely decent free healthcare for all, too? All those other first-world countries seem to have it...
(dons flame retardant suit, hides under rock)
Of course, you could just ask them to stop peering over your shoulder. But that would probably mean you'd have to talk to him...
Another point of data! My father is an engineer, my mother is a nurse, and the only sibling I have is a brother! That's two sons!
No, PPP over SSH is for people who don't know that TCP over TCP in anything less than ideal conditions is a really bad idea.
Does the base station run off batteries, though? Or when the power goes out are you left with a cordless phone that is on, but can't talk to the base station because it's off?
There's lots of sci-fi which doesn't spend vast quantities of time talking about mercenaries. I think you'll find that most sci-fi is set in the future, however :-)
Yes, this is also a gross overgeneralisation, but I suspect one more reliable than the parent's.
Isn't it the the fault of the NOC for making the leap of SPEWS listing -> must be evil spammers? Maybe you (or they) should have read whatever contract you had with them more carefully.
I'm not sure what it means to be a "hacker", but I suspect the definition is probably just a tad more complex than that.
This is especially the case when the shipping is cross-border (especially if that border has a lot of water involved); then you may choose to buy from a different online shop because with shipping included they're much cheaper.
I am also perfectly within my rights to subscribe to some idea of what is immoral that disagrees with others :-)
However. My big complaint would be if you took a code-level (function calls and the like) interface and wrapped it with an RPC-style interface specifically for the purpose of insulating yourself from the GPL code, effectively letting you treat it as if it was LGPLed -- making changes for the sole purpose of making it work better with your proprietary software.
So in that case, scenario one is okay, and two and three aren't.
Why? Because I wouldn't want someone to do it with my GPLed code. It would be especially annoying to see some Mac OS X shareware developer take something I'd done, replace the UI with a shiny Mac OS X GUI, and then charge USD15 for using the result.
I'm perfectly within my rights to disagree with the actions of others, legal or otherwise. But you don't have to agree with me :-)
I also don't see any problem with developing a proprietary IDE that uses GCC to compile its code; you're using interfaces provided by GCC's original developers to do that. But to take an existing GPLed app or library, and add an RPC layer to it so that you can use it from within your non-GPLed code which you intend to distribute to others is fairly clearly against the wishes of the copyright holders of that GPLed code; if they'd wanted you to be able to link with their code from your proprietary app, they'd have used the LGPL or some other similar license.
It means that the app *may* *technically* be in compliance with the GPL (but they're scum for doing it like that). Essentially, they will have an executable with the GPL code, and then an executable with their code (and no GPLed stuff), and some way of communicating between the two. This means that they can get away with releasing only the source for the executable with the GPLed code in it, but it's not terribly useful by itself. The Mac OS X IM client Proetus does this, using GAIM's networking code.
Is it GPL compliant? Maybe; the MySQL guys seem to think that talking to their database over the network amounts to "linking", where as most people traditionally have taken this to mean "merging their code with mine in the same executable".
Is it scummy behaviour that should be discouraged? Absolutely.
Flicker isn't a problem. 25fps is slightly more than what movies are projected in (24fps), and I don't see crowds walking out of movie theatres complaining about the awful flicker. And the FPS figures are the frames per second ratings; both PAL and NTSC are interlaced, so the number of vertical scans down your CRT per second is actually double that; one for all the odd-numbered scanlines, and one for all the even-numbered scanlines.
The reason for the different framerates is that PAL countries have 50Hz power, and NTSC countries have 60Hz; the TV framerate is selected to avoid problems caused by beating with the mains power frequency. On modern sets this doesn't seem to be a problem, however.
But people are already trading unDRMed files online. Making legitimate downloads DRMed just makes things more difficult for those of us who are trying to respect copyright law.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
and the lameness filter is intelligent. it wants a lot of lowercase letters to balance out the uppercase ones above.
Current solutions are designed for distributing large, static files. Most of the traffic of a site like slashdot is 100k dynamic (or at least, frequently changing) HTML. Which means that you're going to be distributing many more objects, with much shorter lifetimes; bittorrent, dijjer, or whatever new scheme someone's thought of this week isn't going to work nearly as well as you'd like.