It's interesting to note the cultural differences. In the Philippines and other nearby Asian countries it's more common to have ones child sleep in the same room (with the parents) until they are 2 or 3 years old. (Often older) Even then many people tend to employ a "yaya" (essentially a live in maid exclusively for the child) for the first 10 or so years. For the most part the child is never out of "someone's" sight for very long.
80 million people in a postage stamp sized country, you can't really sneeze without tripping over 5 or 10 people:-)
I'm not sure what our SIDS statistics are like, I don't think we keep much of a useful count.
Kind of on topic, the spectrum over this way isn't terribly regulated. I can buy any number of Chinese made radios that can transmit anywhere from DC on up to a GHz or two. The equipment on the market is supposed to pass through the telecommunications authority for approval, but nobody really tells the truth on the import documents. Tune up a scanner and you get all kinds of stuff all over the place. Pretty cool really.
Who said anything about a hand out? I don't think you understand the environment you are wanting to change good sir. Or the one you currently have. Dumping the voice carrying component of any mobile or cellular system is not going to happen in your lifetime. It's far too entrenched. Billions of dollars are tied up in this infrastructure, in making it as efficient as possible for the financial benefit of the telco. You'll never make any traditional voice call these days without going through some kind of digital circuit multiplication equipment. DTX-240's and up are pretty common here. This makes the whole system a nice big cash cow, you'll only ever get less bandwidth in this domain. Not only that, people don't link voice and data together - we (you and I) know these things are just bits on the wire, we also see the benefits of switching to VoIP, but your voice is already packet switched and raking in the money, it's hard to change that for a lot of technical reasons (Remember, billions of dollars). We know how cheap bandwidth is, but the majority of people do not. And no matter how much you are willing to pay, you're going to get screwed because of the aforementioned greed, but also because corporations are slow to roll with the trends.
You can have what you want right now, but you'll pay an extortionate rate for the convenience - there are some exceptions to this though. The main problem is that if everyone wants their XXXMbps link to their MiFi, to their iPhone, to their whatever that is fed over 3G, it'll require some pretty massive upgrades on the back end - these are happening right now, but it'll be years before you reap the benefit right across the country. Your average phone on its own can't do much damage, but tethering, the 3G infrastructure isn't quite ready for that yet. I don't make the rules here, I just roll out the tech.
Because 'the industry' that runs the 3G typically runs the GSM and CDMA too. It's obviously not in their interest to hook you, the customer, up with data and then allow you to make unlimited voice calls over your own private SIP server running out of your basement. They want their cake, and they want yours too. Your VoIP sounds better because it typically has a metric arse load more bandwidth to work with. GSM codecs are about 13kbps, your typical land line turns digital a few hundred feet from your front door, 16 - 32kbps is not uncommon. Add an extra hundred or more kbps and this is why VoIP sounds better.
Telco's have been about reducing bandwidth since day one. They aren't about to change this mindset, it'll take a few more generations yet.
I left Australia to get away from the spiders, huntsman spiders in particular. (You'll have to google it yourself, I sure ain't doing it!) So I get to Asia only to find they have these harmless little orb spiders that hang from the trees with leg spans of about 20 cm. Then they have a replacement kind of huntsman, I have no idea what it's called, but these things are not docile like a huntsman, you spray them and they jump, like two feet high, towards you. Pricks. Who the hell invented these little bastards.
How is it learned? I have no recollection of having ever been indoctrinated in to this blind terror that has me screaming like a school girl when confronted with any 8 legged creature bigger than 2 cm. Smaller than this, the screaming stops, but that irrational fear I can't seem to get over. Same for jelly fish.
I have not even the slightest fear of snakes. Even the deadly poisonous kind. Tiny little jumping spider though, that'll have me going out of my way to get around or away from it.
For me the reason is because these alternatives, like kpdf and others, are a little bit flawed. Sure they are fast, they can render the text and images ok, but transparency, layers, masks, and so on, they are a little bit lacking in these areas. Not so good in the publishing world. As bloated and as frustrating as adobe's new stuff is, it is where everyone is at, so it's what I use for the most part.
Plus, even though it's short range, it's conceivable that your neighbour sets the exact same thing up on the other side of the wall.
At 60GHz it doesn't really matter if your neighbours walls are made out of paper. Not much interference is going to happen here. About the only noisy stuff you might come across is RADAR, and you don't often see that above 40GHz (Source: Me, former ELINT drone)
AVG was another one that jumped up pretty massively in file size. Perhaps not quite as fast though. If memory serves, version 6 was somewhere around the 5 megabyte size just a few years back. The latest, version 8, is a tad over 60 megabytes. I bet there is some cruft left over in those virus definitions. Probably more than a few marketing PHB's thinking that a huge file size must mean it's better.
Logging native forest is a dying industry though. In the 70's there were mills dotted all throughout the south eastern part of the country. From Eden through to Bairnsdale. Hundreds of them. Today you'll find nothing but a few rusted steel remnants and a few ghost towns. The mill is the last of the last. Give it a few years and they'll either be gone, or fully renewable.
Toner is either carbon based, or far more commonly a polymer. A fine powder of plastic if you will. Take one giant slab of coloured plastic, grind it up in to a very fine powder, add some creative marketing and an astronomical price tag.
In truth, toner is getting more and more complex, some manufacturers grow it, like a plant, then harvest it in its virginal state, it's pure, it's microscopic. Virgins make for better print quality on your paper apparently.
Maybe this is true in America, but in Asia you get a choice, though only if you ask. If you don't ask, you get an empty hard drive. This is because any effort above "none" will require an additional payment. Less for Linux, more for Windows.
Linux is definitely gaining ground when your average call centre drone knows what it is though. Most netbooks sold here have it.
No permanent endless war you say: Me, I say there has always been war in general, and probably always will be for the rest of my lifetime at the very least.
You might have missed the 40's (second world war), the 50's (Korea), the 60's and 70's (Vietnam), not too much going on in the 80's but the cold war was drawing to a close, the 90's (Iraq), the 00's (Iraq and Afghanistan).
Where are these 'no endless wars' you are talking about?
I don't think much has changed myself. Viruses still rely on peoples willingness to share and do the stupid. These days the only difference is that things have modernised, we've replaced the floppy with any device having storage space on it. Be those memory sticks, cell phones, digital cameras, MP3/4 players, external hard drives, and so on. This is where the spread is happening. In a large way we can thank Microsoft for their default auto run feature here.
The main reasons: Ad Revenue. Search Engine Optimisation. And, as you say, annoying website builders. The average site visitor doesn't much care either way.
You could also ask if people have ever heard of Google's Android. If it wasn't for slashdot, I'd be none the wiser to either entity. If I was the decision maker here, I'd give it to Android Data, they registered first, and it's not like they've sat around on their rear end for 5 or more years waiting for Android on cell phones to get real huge either.
There might be enough gravity, unless we can build an FTL drive of some type, who can really tell. Theories such as dark matter and dark energy try fill the gap, though there are some new ideas popping up that say these big universal constants might not be so constant after all. Blasphemous I know. Apologies if you are a physicist or something and understand this infinitely better than I do. (There are no stupid statements, just one stupid me):-)
Your analogy is a little broken. Stealing cable is theft of service when you directly tap in to the distribution lines outside your house. (I don't make the rules!) One cute way to avoid having to run your own cable from the pole is (which I may or may not have actually done) by installing a small (say 3 or 4 foot high) discone wide band scanning antenna out on the pole splitter. You could mount it all professional like, then put 'property of AT&T' stickers on it as a finishing touch. From there you can point your 32 element beam at it and get some free TV juice. The local free to air crap might block out a channel or two on a bad day, but hell, free cable without the wires or the hassle of getting caught. (Note, hiding your 32 element yagi is beyond the scope of this comment)
If you just want limited distribution you can always upload a web based file manager to your host. I use AjaXplorer (there are hundreds of others) It was the only one I could find with a 3 minute google search that allowed a largely unlimited number of file uploads in one go. (Drag and drop)
I guess you are talking about stuff for which you don't hold a license or copyright though, in which case you place your trust along side the masses and hope you don't get singled out of the herd.
Reaction time is a pretty effective way to figure out how fast people can generally respond to or avoid some external stimulus, and no surprise that we all do this at roughly the same speed. Is this the speed of thought? Even the Michael Schumachers and fighter pilots of the world have pretty much identical reaction times to you or I. They are entirely average in that sense. None of us are super human, we are all just human. (I guess this is your point though?)
A particular skill set can be developed for sure, no matter who you are. Some of us manage this because we have a keen interest in the subject matter, while others have a natural flare for it, interested or otherwise. There are also those that will never understand some particular thing or other, no matter how much effort is expended on it. I don't know why this is, we are all roughly equal in the brain department.
How do you define intelligence anyway? For me at least, the brain is truly a mysterious and fascinating bit of kit. (And this whole mysterious also encompasses 'intelligence')
You can already get this stuff. Speakeasy (Sold by Telecom - now Telstra) is a nice little encryption box for your normal POTS system. If you are using Symbian there are a few applications around already that will encrypt your voice. Or you could just use VOIP and your own SIP server or something.
No, that was the 1990's method. Now the average internet user willingly installs spyware, which then installs a keylogger, reads your address book, looks for credit card information, extracts any passwords it can, and fires all of that off to the overlord for analysis and spamming. I run a catch all on several domains, not much comes in using random values, pretty much all of it is targeted at specific addresses.
Perhaps locked in a series of rooms is a better phrase. This is what intellink is for. Clerarly secure intelligence networks have been around in more than one form for a lot longer than 15 years. Even the stupidest of stupid contractors is going to know he or she will have their arse (ass) handed to them if they put terrabytes of information on an internet connected node.
Sure, but here's a twist. Australia decided not so long back that they really want the F-22, but the previous government had done all the paperwork for the F-35.
Maybe someone wants to shelve the project so that the project becomes impossible to sell. Militarily Australias biggest threat is Asia.
And seriously, who the hell leaves F-35 plans on an unsecure computer in the Pentagon. Air gap people. My assumption is that someone wanted this information to get out. Be it real or fake, doesn't matter, selling the F-35 just became impossible.
They aren't making much money from the Philippines then. The most expensive movie you can see here is around $10 USD, and that's for a world wide hyped movie on opening night at the posh end of town. On average it's about $4 in a good cinema. They are competing against piracy though, a single pirated movie is about $1, $2 will get you a disc containing anywhere up to 32 movies. 12 is about average though, any more than that and the compression makes them look worse than the phone cam in the cinema kind. Now an original movie purchased from a store in shrink wrap with hologram stickers, that'll set you back 1 to 2 bucks as well. They are well and truly in competition with the pirates now. Arrrrr. Most people can't be arsed to go to the mall and buy the originals though. Pirated stuff lives closer to home, and it has the adverts stripped out.
So aside from geographic IP mapping which is trivially defeated with proxies, or charging a single price for world wide distribution, people are just going to flock to the cheapest and most convenient source. I figure if they can still turn a profit at 2 bucks for an original movie on DVD, they aren't hurting so bad after all.
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It's interesting to note the cultural differences. In the Philippines and other nearby Asian countries it's more common to have ones child sleep in the same room (with the parents) until they are 2 or 3 years old. (Often older) Even then many people tend to employ a "yaya" (essentially a live in maid exclusively for the child) for the first 10 or so years. For the most part the child is never out of "someone's" sight for very long.
80 million people in a postage stamp sized country, you can't really sneeze without tripping over 5 or 10 people :-)
I'm not sure what our SIDS statistics are like, I don't think we keep much of a useful count.
Kind of on topic, the spectrum over this way isn't terribly regulated. I can buy any number of Chinese made radios that can transmit anywhere from DC on up to a GHz or two. The equipment on the market is supposed to pass through the telecommunications authority for approval, but nobody really tells the truth on the import documents. Tune up a scanner and you get all kinds of stuff all over the place. Pretty cool really.
Who said anything about a hand out? I don't think you understand the environment you are wanting to change good sir. Or the one you currently have. Dumping the voice carrying component of any mobile or cellular system is not going to happen in your lifetime. It's far too entrenched. Billions of dollars are tied up in this infrastructure, in making it as efficient as possible for the financial benefit of the telco. You'll never make any traditional voice call these days without going through some kind of digital circuit multiplication equipment. DTX-240's and up are pretty common here. This makes the whole system a nice big cash cow, you'll only ever get less bandwidth in this domain. Not only that, people don't link voice and data together - we (you and I) know these things are just bits on the wire, we also see the benefits of switching to VoIP, but your voice is already packet switched and raking in the money, it's hard to change that for a lot of technical reasons (Remember, billions of dollars). We know how cheap bandwidth is, but the majority of people do not. And no matter how much you are willing to pay, you're going to get screwed because of the aforementioned greed, but also because corporations are slow to roll with the trends.
You can have what you want right now, but you'll pay an extortionate rate for the convenience - there are some exceptions to this though. The main problem is that if everyone wants their XXXMbps link to their MiFi, to their iPhone, to their whatever that is fed over 3G, it'll require some pretty massive upgrades on the back end - these are happening right now, but it'll be years before you reap the benefit right across the country. Your average phone on its own can't do much damage, but tethering, the 3G infrastructure isn't quite ready for that yet. I don't make the rules here, I just roll out the tech.
Because 'the industry' that runs the 3G typically runs the GSM and CDMA too. It's obviously not in their interest to hook you, the customer, up with data and then allow you to make unlimited voice calls over your own private SIP server running out of your basement. They want their cake, and they want yours too. Your VoIP sounds better because it typically has a metric arse load more bandwidth to work with. GSM codecs are about 13kbps, your typical land line turns digital a few hundred feet from your front door, 16 - 32kbps is not uncommon. Add an extra hundred or more kbps and this is why VoIP sounds better.
Telco's have been about reducing bandwidth since day one. They aren't about to change this mindset, it'll take a few more generations yet.
I left Australia to get away from the spiders, huntsman spiders in particular. (You'll have to google it yourself, I sure ain't doing it!) So I get to Asia only to find they have these harmless little orb spiders that hang from the trees with leg spans of about 20 cm. Then they have a replacement kind of huntsman, I have no idea what it's called, but these things are not docile like a huntsman, you spray them and they jump, like two feet high, towards you. Pricks. Who the hell invented these little bastards.
How is it learned? I have no recollection of having ever been indoctrinated in to this blind terror that has me screaming like a school girl when confronted with any 8 legged creature bigger than 2 cm. Smaller than this, the screaming stops, but that irrational fear I can't seem to get over. Same for jelly fish.
I have not even the slightest fear of snakes. Even the deadly poisonous kind. Tiny little jumping spider though, that'll have me going out of my way to get around or away from it.
For me the reason is because these alternatives, like kpdf and others, are a little bit flawed. Sure they are fast, they can render the text and images ok, but transparency, layers, masks, and so on, they are a little bit lacking in these areas. Not so good in the publishing world. As bloated and as frustrating as adobe's new stuff is, it is where everyone is at, so it's what I use for the most part.
Plus, even though it's short range, it's conceivable that your neighbour sets the exact same thing up on the other side of the wall.
At 60GHz it doesn't really matter if your neighbours walls are made out of paper. Not much interference is going to happen here. About the only noisy stuff you might come across is RADAR, and you don't often see that above 40GHz (Source: Me, former ELINT drone)
AVG was another one that jumped up pretty massively in file size. Perhaps not quite as fast though. If memory serves, version 6 was somewhere around the 5 megabyte size just a few years back. The latest, version 8, is a tad over 60 megabytes. I bet there is some cruft left over in those virus definitions. Probably more than a few marketing PHB's thinking that a huge file size must mean it's better.
Logging native forest is a dying industry though. In the 70's there were mills dotted all throughout the south eastern part of the country. From Eden through to Bairnsdale. Hundreds of them. Today you'll find nothing but a few rusted steel remnants and a few ghost towns. The mill is the last of the last. Give it a few years and they'll either be gone, or fully renewable.
Toner is either carbon based, or far more commonly a polymer. A fine powder of plastic if you will. Take one giant slab of coloured plastic, grind it up in to a very fine powder, add some creative marketing and an astronomical price tag.
In truth, toner is getting more and more complex, some manufacturers grow it, like a plant, then harvest it in its virginal state, it's pure, it's microscopic. Virgins make for better print quality on your paper apparently.
Maybe this is true in America, but in Asia you get a choice, though only if you ask. If you don't ask, you get an empty hard drive. This is because any effort above "none" will require an additional payment. Less for Linux, more for Windows.
Linux is definitely gaining ground when your average call centre drone knows what it is though. Most netbooks sold here have it.
No permanent endless war you say: Me, I say there has always been war in general, and probably always will be for the rest of my lifetime at the very least.
You might have missed the 40's (second world war), the 50's (Korea), the 60's and 70's (Vietnam), not too much going on in the 80's but the cold war was drawing to a close, the 90's (Iraq), the 00's (Iraq and Afghanistan).
Where are these 'no endless wars' you are talking about?
I don't think much has changed myself. Viruses still rely on peoples willingness to share and do the stupid. These days the only difference is that things have modernised, we've replaced the floppy with any device having storage space on it. Be those memory sticks, cell phones, digital cameras, MP3/4 players, external hard drives, and so on. This is where the spread is happening. In a large way we can thank Microsoft for their default auto run feature here.
The main reasons: Ad Revenue. Search Engine Optimisation. And, as you say, annoying website builders. The average site visitor doesn't much care either way.
You could also ask if people have ever heard of Google's Android. If it wasn't for slashdot, I'd be none the wiser to either entity. If I was the decision maker here, I'd give it to Android Data, they registered first, and it's not like they've sat around on their rear end for 5 or more years waiting for Android on cell phones to get real huge either.
There might be enough gravity, unless we can build an FTL drive of some type, who can really tell. Theories such as dark matter and dark energy try fill the gap, though there are some new ideas popping up that say these big universal constants might not be so constant after all. Blasphemous I know. Apologies if you are a physicist or something and understand this infinitely better than I do. (There are no stupid statements, just one stupid me) :-)
No grep for the filing cabinet? My god man, are you serious? Around here the command is a verbal "nice -20 Office Beeyatch grep -i report"
Your analogy is a little broken. Stealing cable is theft of service when you directly tap in to the distribution lines outside your house. (I don't make the rules!) One cute way to avoid having to run your own cable from the pole is (which I may or may not have actually done) by installing a small (say 3 or 4 foot high) discone wide band scanning antenna out on the pole splitter. You could mount it all professional like, then put 'property of AT&T' stickers on it as a finishing touch. From there you can point your 32 element beam at it and get some free TV juice. The local free to air crap might block out a channel or two on a bad day, but hell, free cable without the wires or the hassle of getting caught. (Note, hiding your 32 element yagi is beyond the scope of this comment)
If you just want limited distribution you can always upload a web based file manager to your host. I use AjaXplorer (there are hundreds of others) It was the only one I could find with a 3 minute google search that allowed a largely unlimited number of file uploads in one go. (Drag and drop)
I guess you are talking about stuff for which you don't hold a license or copyright though, in which case you place your trust along side the masses and hope you don't get singled out of the herd.
Reaction time is a pretty effective way to figure out how fast people can generally respond to or avoid some external stimulus, and no surprise that we all do this at roughly the same speed. Is this the speed of thought? Even the Michael Schumachers and fighter pilots of the world have pretty much identical reaction times to you or I. They are entirely average in that sense. None of us are super human, we are all just human. (I guess this is your point though?)
A particular skill set can be developed for sure, no matter who you are. Some of us manage this because we have a keen interest in the subject matter, while others have a natural flare for it, interested or otherwise. There are also those that will never understand some particular thing or other, no matter how much effort is expended on it. I don't know why this is, we are all roughly equal in the brain department.
How do you define intelligence anyway? For me at least, the brain is truly a mysterious and fascinating bit of kit. (And this whole mysterious also encompasses 'intelligence')
You can already get this stuff. Speakeasy (Sold by Telecom - now Telstra) is a nice little encryption box for your normal POTS system. If you are using Symbian there are a few applications around already that will encrypt your voice. Or you could just use VOIP and your own SIP server or something.
No, that was the 1990's method. Now the average internet user willingly installs spyware, which then installs a keylogger, reads your address book, looks for credit card information, extracts any passwords it can, and fires all of that off to the overlord for analysis and spamming. I run a catch all on several domains, not much comes in using random values, pretty much all of it is targeted at specific addresses.
Perhaps locked in a series of rooms is a better phrase. This is what intellink is for. Clerarly secure intelligence networks have been around in more than one form for a lot longer than 15 years. Even the stupidest of stupid contractors is going to know he or she will have their arse (ass) handed to them if they put terrabytes of information on an internet connected node.
Sure, but here's a twist. Australia decided not so long back that they really want the F-22, but the previous government had done all the paperwork for the F-35.
Maybe someone wants to shelve the project so that the project becomes impossible to sell. Militarily Australias biggest threat is Asia.
And seriously, who the hell leaves F-35 plans on an unsecure computer in the Pentagon. Air gap people. My assumption is that someone wanted this information to get out. Be it real or fake, doesn't matter, selling the F-35 just became impossible.
They aren't making much money from the Philippines then. The most expensive movie you can see here is around $10 USD, and that's for a world wide hyped movie on opening night at the posh end of town. On average it's about $4 in a good cinema. They are competing against piracy though, a single pirated movie is about $1, $2 will get you a disc containing anywhere up to 32 movies. 12 is about average though, any more than that and the compression makes them look worse than the phone cam in the cinema kind. Now an original movie purchased from a store in shrink wrap with hologram stickers, that'll set you back 1 to 2 bucks as well. They are well and truly in competition with the pirates now. Arrrrr. Most people can't be arsed to go to the mall and buy the originals though. Pirated stuff lives closer to home, and it has the adverts stripped out.
So aside from geographic IP mapping which is trivially defeated with proxies, or charging a single price for world wide distribution, people are just going to flock to the cheapest and most convenient source. I figure if they can still turn a profit at 2 bucks for an original movie on DVD, they aren't hurting so bad after all.