Not true. Standard definition sets show an interlaced image. Since DVDs are recorded with a full frame, it will look "better" on an non-interlaced monitor (provided you have a "progressive scan" DVD player).
Bzzt! Wrong. Almost all DVDs are recorded as an interlaced signal - even stuff that comes from film are usually recorded as 3-2 pulldown interlaced fields. Yes, there is magic that a player can do to recover the progressive frames from a 3-2 pulldown interlaced video (not always successful) but a large number of DVDs are interlaced to begin with I'm afraid, and displaying them well on a progressive display involves deinterlacing them which actually _reduces_ the quality.
if Netscape had won the browser war, and IE had negligible usage numbers, everyone would be writing for Netscape 4 compatibility
No they wouldn't - they would have been writing for a reasonably recent Netscape on the assumption that people would keep reasonably up to date as new versions of Netscape are released.
The problem with IE's market dominance is that for the past few years there has been _no_ development so users didn't get to upgrade their current web browser, they had to switch to a completely different product instead (which most users won't do). What makes it even worse is that the continued bundling of an ancient technology with a modern system makes IE _look_ to most users as if it is a up to date technology. This means that most users _do not even know_ that their use of IE is helping to create a stagnant world wide web.
I'm not sure what's worse - the fact that IE hasn't been developed in years or the fact that Microsoft is releasing a new version of IE that still won't support current standards. People will download IE7 and assume that it's up to date when infact it's _still_ old technology that's been given a bit of a face lift. (IE 7 _still_ won't support important standards like XHTML which have been well supported by other browsers for a long time).
The idea of excluding IE users from commercial web sites is crazy _because_ of it's market share - businesses just can't afford to lose the majority of customers who will refuse to upgrade in the short term. Whilest excluding IE users may well improve the web in the long term, by the time it does all the businesses who tried it will be bankrupt.
IE sucks, so write for Firefox, Opera, etc, and tell your users to upgrade.
Right, and a web based business can _really_ afford to be incompatable with 95% of it's potential customers? I'm sorry, but if you think the majority of IE users will upgrade to FireFox just because some e-commerce site wants them to then you are sadly mistaken.
I don't see the relevance of your arguement - who are you suggesting is dumb here? The people who are using the bundled software because they can't be bothered to download something better? The third party manufacturers who get run out of business by Microsoft's illegal practices? Or maybe the people who _want_ to use a non-microsoft application but can't because the world revolves around the defacto "standards" from MS?
MS's illegal business practices don't _only_ harm to people who are "too dumb" to know any better, they harm everyone except MS because they run competing companies out of business, make it impossible to use non-MS platforms and when they have the "market share" they cease putting resources into it's development.
Or are you saying that the stagnation of the web over the past 6 years due to IE's lack of development is good for everyone? Yes, I really like having to write web pages in a half arsed implementation of part of a 10 year old standard.
A better analogy would be, Coke making most of the fridges, so they should be banned from providing free cans of coke when you buy one. Or they have to allow Rola Cola to advertise inside them.
Your analogy fails because Coke is a consumable. A better analogy would be the (almost) sole manufacturer of fridges bundling a free life time supply of coke that's delivered to your door by magic. Now, maybe Pepsi tastes a bit better, but does it taste better _enough_ to warrant the effort and money involved in buying it instead of using your free Coke that you never even need to go to the shop to buy. I would argue that it immediately puts Pepsi at a huge unfair disadvantage purely because they didn't own a fridge manufacturer.
What's wrong with MS trying to sell software? If Windows was shipped with no applications would you go out and pay MS money for the pile of shit known as IE or would you just download FireFox for free?
The problem is _not_ that MS are giving stuff away for free, it's that they're bundling their own stuff with the OS so 99% of the time people won't even look at the alternatives to the bundled software (hell, 98% of the people probably don't even know there _are_ alternatives since everyone just uses the bundled software).
And then a major problem with the vast majority of people using what MS supply is that MS "standards" become the defacto standard which everyone uses and that excludes the minority who don't want to pay MS money for their inferior products.
If MS just supplied the unbundled OS and then let people download the applications they need then it would become more obvious that there are (often better) alternatives.
And possibly more to the point, 1. most Linux distributions come with multiple "competing" applications so the user gets a choice from the start and 2. whoever is bundling the applications generally doesn't make them themselves (Gaim, FireFox, etc. aren't made by KDE, Red Hat, Novell, etc).
The general idea is to make public transport more cost effective, by comparison, by making cars less so. Ideally, the response should be more people using public transport, and that (with more income and demand) eventually results in more frequent and convenient public transport. Unfortunately this doesn't happen overnight, even if it works there will be a period of some years when you both pay more to use cars and still have poor public transport.
Well, there are several problems with this approach:
1. The UK government raises taxes on fuel to make cars more expensive. Of course, busses also run on fuel and have to pay the increased tax so they raise their prices to compensate - the only winning party is the government who now gets more cash from taxing everyone. Maybe public transport should be allowed to use red diesel?
2. What if there's no sensible bus route and there's never likely to be (e.g. rural areas)? Why should I be charged a prohibutive amount of money to use the only form of transport available (car)?
3. Certain activities *can't* be done by bus - for example, I can't take all my windsurfing kit from my home to the beach by bus. Why should I be charged a prohibutive amount of money for the only sensible form of transport for the activity? (I already pay a crazy amount of money to the council for parking at the beach anyway).
And it doesn't just stop at busses - I will be going skiing this winter with 3 other people via the channel tunnel. The return train journey from Southampton to London Waterloo (the terminal for the channel tunnel) is going to cost us 120 pounds. The only reason this is even worth considering is because we're going for a week so have long stay parking to consider. If we were going for a day it's way more cost effective to take a car rather than using public transport (taking a car would probably cost about 15 pounds in fuel).
If public transport is so much more efficient than a car it _should not cost 10 times as much_ in the first place, if it does there's something very wrong. Raising the price of using cars is not the answer because it hits everyone who has no choice, fixing the public transport system is what needs to be done.
My point was that if Americans complain _now_ despite the fuel being relatively cheap, there doesn't seem to be much chance of raising taxes on fuel without massive public outcry.
and encourage fuel efficiency at the same time; but to charge different rates depending on congestion
When will governments get it into their heads that charging people more _won't_ reduce congestion. Do they think I spend an hour sitting in traffic each morning for fun? No - I spend an hour sitting in traffic each morning because I have to get to work, if I could avoid it I would.
(And no, I can't use public transport - it'd take me 3 or 4 hours to get the bus into work... Hell, when I used to work in the city centre (you would expect that to have good public transport) it used to take over an hour for the bus to do the 5 mile journey (which took 15 minutes by car) if it bothered to turn up at all. For the record, I live in Southampton, UK).
The way to get me to use public transport is to provide a service that is cost effective and actually *useful*. Making it faster for me to walk than catch the bus is not useful. Taxing the crap out of cars is not the answer since it unfairly hits all the people who can't use the bus for whatever reason (no bus service, disability, needing to transport large objects, etc)
increase registration fees for vehicles that get more milage
Yes, because penalising people for buying mroe environmentally friendly cars is a great idea...
Other than that, I agree with you about increasing fuel tax (which correctly penalises those who have less efficient cars). GPS tracking is a waste of time since it would cost a reasonable amount to put the infrastructure in place and doesn't do anything to discourage the use of inefficient vehicles.
There is very little outcry from Americans about this, but the government does put a huge tax on our gas.
I keep hearing Americans whinge about the extortionate fuel prices and that they can't afford to fill up their cars, and yet fuel prices in the US are a _fraction_ of the price of fuel in Europe.
Why should I care if they know what I buy or where I drive?
What happens if the tracking shows that you were near a terrorist bombing... and the tracking also shows you were at the garden centre buying fertiliser. Maybe you weren't guilty, but with enough tracking there may well be plenty of "evidence" that makes you look guilty. And since the law enforcement authorities seem to be able to get away with *anything* at the mention of the "T" word you could well find yourself banged up in jail even though there's no solid evidence against you.
This is my problem with national databases - given enough data, innocent parties can look guilty. I.e. contrary to popular belief, DNA and fingerprints are *not* necessarilly unique - looking at the fingerprints of a small number of people who are already suspected of a crime is one thing, but given a database of *everyone's* finger prints I worry that innocent people will be dragged through the courts (and possibly convicted) purely because the database showed a match.
Didn't we pay taxes to build the roads in the first place? Will these fees be accompanied by the reduction of taxes, since they are getting transportation funding elsewhere?
A similar system has been proposed here in the UK - the government wanted to reduce fuel tax and use GPS tracking to charge per mile instead. Which is a plain stupid idea since fuel tax effectively charges per mile, plus: 1. Discourages use of inefficient vehicles 2. Doesn't require a vast tracking infrastructure costing vast amounts of money 3. Doesn't have any legal or civil rights implications to do with tracking people's whereabouts.
Of course, the US government can't get away with a huge tax on fuel because there is outcry from the Americans if it costs more than $10 to fill their huge SUVs. (I currently pay about 89 pence per litre of unleaded).
More to the point why do we even need a national ID card? It's a solution looking for a problem.
This is a debate that's currently going on here in the UK - the government wants to spend vast amounts of money on national ID cards in the name of "preventing terrorism" but have not yet managed to explain to anyone _how_ this prevents terrorism. It seems that pretty much everyone with a clue who's not an MP universally thinks it's a waste of money (including the security services!) and I have to agree with them.
As well as the financial implications of ID cards, there is the civil liberties problem - why should I be required to carry around ID to prove who I am? Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the security services? An ID card is just another thing to get lost or stolen, will I be thrown in jail if I don't have my ID card with me for whatever reason?
I keep thinking back to the old cold war movies. How we laughed at people being required to carry around their "papers" and being thrown in jail if their papers weren't in order. Look who's laughing now.
It seems to me that ever since 9/11 any mention of the word "terroism" by the government has just signalled an attempt to push through their own agenda while people are too busy panicing to notice.
As far as browsers that implement features outside the standard, I don't understand why the purists would want to count that against the browser's compliancy status.
The problem with supporting "extensions" is that people (who don't know any better) will use them. They then become a defacto standard which makes browsers that don't implement it render the page incorrectly and appear "buggy" to the layman.
We have already seen this problem with IE's non-standard extensions resulting in pages not rendering correctly in FireFox, Opera, etc. You wouldn't believe the number of times people tell me they don't use FireFox because it's buggy since it won't even render a website they regularly use (it doesn't matter to most users that the website was coded by a moron - if it works in IE and doesn't work in FireFox then as far as they are concerned that's a bug in FireFox).
Happilly, with the increase in use of non-IE browsers and mobile devices it seems that many webmasters are getting a clue. But we don't want to reverse that trend by promoting extensions.
That's sticky ground. Does writing a module, compiling it and distributing the object code constitute a "derivative work" of the Kernel? If so, then they are required to GPL it.
I think the opinion most people have is that it's very shakey ground and the only reason nVidia aren't pressured into releasing their drivers is because they happen to be pretty good at supporting the Linux world with their closed drivers.
I don't think anyone would have problems into pressuring a router manufacturer to release their code though.
But you want me to use the stable whatever last version of Red Hat/Fedora came out. 9.something was it from 1999?
The latest official stable RedHat supported distribution (RHEL 4) was released on Feb 15th 2005. The latest stable Fedora Core release (Fedora Core 4) was released on 13th June 2005.
Linux on the Desktop? Not if the user has a wireless card.
The problem with the wireless hardware is that: 1. Most of the manufacturers haven't released any specs so the driver writing has needed lots of reverse engineering. 2. Much of the hardware has gone through rapid development cycles, meaning that by the time the drivers are available you probably can't get the hardware anymore. 3. Linked with (2), many of the manufacturers sell their updated revisions under the same name, model number and even FCCID in some cases, even though the new revision is *completely* incompatable with the old revision, so you may end up researching which hardware will work only to find that when you buy that hardware is is an incompatable revision. 4. Most cards require uploadable firmware which the manufacturers won't release under good licences so can't be shipped with most linux distributions as standard so you have to download it yourself.
The Prism54 drivers are a good example of (2) and (3) - the drivers were of good quality but by the time they made it into the stock kernel Intersil had stopped making the supported chipset and had replaced it with a completely incompatable SoftMAC based chipset. A number of the manufacturers, such as SMC, released the cards using the SoftMAC chipset under the same name and model number as the old ones and it was nigh on impossible to know which version you were going to end up with because even the retailers didn't know there were 2 incompatable versions of the same card.
I understand that the new Prism54 drivers now support the SoftMAC chipsets so maybe I'll fetch the incompatable SMC card I ended up with off the shelf. Interestingly, the Prism54 website says they're working on an open GPL firmware and I hope they succeed in producing it as that means we can at last have some hardware *completely* supported by a vanilla kernel. Having GPLed firmware also opens up some possibilities for new uses for the hardware since interested parties can hack the firmware to do strange new things (enhanced Mesh networking, etc?)
Speaking from experience of setting up supported Prism54 802.11g cards under both Fedora 3 and 4, it's simply a case of grabbing the firmware and sticking it in the right place and then it Just Works - you can't get a lot easier than that unless the distributor breaks the firmware licence and bundles the firmware illegally.
The last time I installed Fedora Core 4 off a boot CD I was amazed that to do an ftp install I still had to punch in manually what mirror I wanted to do the install from. Computer games have been grabbing "master server lists" for some time now. Can't something similar be worked into the FTP install?
Maybe you don't want to install off one of the official mirrors?
As more people start using wireless it becomes pretty obvious that improving the infastructure of wireless networks really is the next big step
Well it doesn't seem like rocket science to create a standard allowing foreign access points to negotiate with eachother for collision-free use of the bandwidth (in situations where the APs can see eachother). An even nicer idea would be to make all of the nodes into an ad-hoc mesh - keep the normal star topology with access points in the middle but edge client nodes could relay management messages between two APs if the APs couldn't see eachother.
And of course, extending the idea further, it's not just management data that could be spread over a mesh - you could use foreign access points as relays for your network. If they're on the same channels then there's no reduction in bandwidth caused by relaying 3rd party data.
You'd keep the logical networks separate of course, using some encryption. So you'd end up with a mesh of nodes relaying data for multiple encrypted vlans and still probably have better performance than current systems since they can interoperate to control collisions.
Minor point, I think the act was used by the police to prevent him from re-entering. They just used regular bouncers to eject him.
You are correct - the bouncers ejected (read: assaulted) him and then the police "detained" him under the anti-terrorism laws.
Then to add insult to injury, Blair still tried to push through a law that would allow the police to detain anyone for 90 days without charge, defending it by saying the police were very responsible and would never abuse a law.
This is a prime example of why excessively broad laws are always a bad idea - whilest it may improve the ability to legitimately target people doing wrong it will always be abused by someone as well.
Through all the IRA attacks whilest I was young the constant message delivered by the UK government was that if we changed the way we lived because of terrorism then the terrorists have won... well I guess we know who's won now then don't we? (Amazingly enough, Blair used the "if terrorism changes the way we live then they've won" speech in a justification of curtailing civil liberties in the name of anti-terrorism!)
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But these don't exist in the US.
Sounds a bit crazy to me - I've had my standard definition Sony 16:9 TV for the past 5 years... cost me 550ukp.
Not true. Standard definition sets show an interlaced image. Since DVDs are recorded with a full frame, it will look "better" on an non-interlaced monitor (provided you have a "progressive scan" DVD player).
Bzzt! Wrong. Almost all DVDs are recorded as an interlaced signal - even stuff that comes from film are usually recorded as 3-2 pulldown interlaced fields. Yes, there is magic that a player can do to recover the progressive frames from a 3-2 pulldown interlaced video (not always successful) but a large number of DVDs are interlaced to begin with I'm afraid, and displaying them well on a progressive display involves deinterlacing them which actually _reduces_ the quality.
My HDTV was purchased for DVDs
Except DVDs aren't HD - you could get identical quality out of your DVDs with a standard definition 16:9 screen...
if Netscape had won the browser war, and IE had negligible usage numbers, everyone would be writing for Netscape 4 compatibility
No they wouldn't - they would have been writing for a reasonably recent Netscape on the assumption that people would keep reasonably up to date as new versions of Netscape are released.
The problem with IE's market dominance is that for the past few years there has been _no_ development so users didn't get to upgrade their current web browser, they had to switch to a completely different product instead (which most users won't do). What makes it even worse is that the continued bundling of an ancient technology with a modern system makes IE _look_ to most users as if it is a up to date technology. This means that most users _do not even know_ that their use of IE is helping to create a stagnant world wide web.
I'm not sure what's worse - the fact that IE hasn't been developed in years or the fact that Microsoft is releasing a new version of IE that still won't support current standards. People will download IE7 and assume that it's up to date when infact it's _still_ old technology that's been given a bit of a face lift. (IE 7 _still_ won't support important standards like XHTML which have been well supported by other browsers for a long time).
The idea of excluding IE users from commercial web sites is crazy _because_ of it's market share - businesses just can't afford to lose the majority of customers who will refuse to upgrade in the short term. Whilest excluding IE users may well improve the web in the long term, by the time it does all the businesses who tried it will be bankrupt.
IE sucks, so write for Firefox, Opera, etc, and tell your users to upgrade.
Right, and a web based business can _really_ afford to be incompatable with 95% of it's potential customers? I'm sorry, but if you think the majority of IE users will upgrade to FireFox just because some e-commerce site wants them to then you are sadly mistaken.
It's not our problem that people are dumb.
I don't see the relevance of your arguement - who are you suggesting is dumb here? The people who are using the bundled software because they can't be bothered to download something better? The third party manufacturers who get run out of business by Microsoft's illegal practices? Or maybe the people who _want_ to use a non-microsoft application but can't because the world revolves around the defacto "standards" from MS?
MS's illegal business practices don't _only_ harm to people who are "too dumb" to know any better, they harm everyone except MS because they run competing companies out of business, make it impossible to use non-MS platforms and when they have the "market share" they cease putting resources into it's development.
Or are you saying that the stagnation of the web over the past 6 years due to IE's lack of development is good for everyone? Yes, I really like having to write web pages in a half arsed implementation of part of a 10 year old standard.
A better analogy would be, Coke making most of the fridges, so they should be banned from providing free cans of coke when you buy one. Or they have to allow Rola Cola to advertise inside them.
Your analogy fails because Coke is a consumable. A better analogy would be the (almost) sole manufacturer of fridges bundling a free life time supply of coke that's delivered to your door by magic. Now, maybe Pepsi tastes a bit better, but does it taste better _enough_ to warrant the effort and money involved in buying it instead of using your free Coke that you never even need to go to the shop to buy. I would argue that it immediately puts Pepsi at a huge unfair disadvantage purely because they didn't own a fridge manufacturer.
What's wrong with MS trying to sell software? If Windows was shipped with no applications would you go out and pay MS money for the pile of shit known as IE or would you just download FireFox for free?
The problem is _not_ that MS are giving stuff away for free, it's that they're bundling their own stuff with the OS so 99% of the time people won't even look at the alternatives to the bundled software (hell, 98% of the people probably don't even know there _are_ alternatives since everyone just uses the bundled software).
And then a major problem with the vast majority of people using what MS supply is that MS "standards" become the defacto standard which everyone uses and that excludes the minority who don't want to pay MS money for their inferior products.
If MS just supplied the unbundled OS and then let people download the applications they need then it would become more obvious that there are (often better) alternatives.
And possibly more to the point, 1. most Linux distributions come with multiple "competing" applications so the user gets a choice from the start and 2. whoever is bundling the applications generally doesn't make them themselves (Gaim, FireFox, etc. aren't made by KDE, Red Hat, Novell, etc).
The general idea is to make public transport more cost effective, by comparison, by making cars less so. Ideally, the response should be more people using public transport, and that (with more income and demand) eventually results in more frequent and convenient public transport. Unfortunately this doesn't happen overnight, even if it works there will be a period of some years when you both pay more to use cars and still have poor public transport.
Well, there are several problems with this approach:
1. The UK government raises taxes on fuel to make cars more expensive. Of course, busses also run on fuel and have to pay the increased tax so they raise their prices to compensate - the only winning party is the government who now gets more cash from taxing everyone. Maybe public transport should be allowed to use red diesel?
2. What if there's no sensible bus route and there's never likely to be (e.g. rural areas)? Why should I be charged a prohibutive amount of money to use the only form of transport available (car)?
3. Certain activities *can't* be done by bus - for example, I can't take all my windsurfing kit from my home to the beach by bus. Why should I be charged a prohibutive amount of money for the only sensible form of transport for the activity? (I already pay a crazy amount of money to the council for parking at the beach anyway).
And it doesn't just stop at busses - I will be going skiing this winter with 3 other people via the channel tunnel. The return train journey from Southampton to London Waterloo (the terminal for the channel tunnel) is going to cost us 120 pounds. The only reason this is even worth considering is because we're going for a week so have long stay parking to consider. If we were going for a day it's way more cost effective to take a car rather than using public transport (taking a car would probably cost about 15 pounds in fuel).
If public transport is so much more efficient than a car it _should not cost 10 times as much_ in the first place, if it does there's something very wrong. Raising the price of using cars is not the answer because it hits everyone who has no choice, fixing the public transport system is what needs to be done.
My point was that if Americans complain _now_ despite the fuel being relatively cheap, there doesn't seem to be much chance of raising taxes on fuel without massive public outcry.
and encourage fuel efficiency at the same time; but to charge different rates depending on congestion
When will governments get it into their heads that charging people more _won't_ reduce congestion. Do they think I spend an hour sitting in traffic each morning for fun? No - I spend an hour sitting in traffic each morning because I have to get to work, if I could avoid it I would.
(And no, I can't use public transport - it'd take me 3 or 4 hours to get the bus into work... Hell, when I used to work in the city centre (you would expect that to have good public transport) it used to take over an hour for the bus to do the 5 mile journey (which took 15 minutes by car) if it bothered to turn up at all. For the record, I live in Southampton, UK).
The way to get me to use public transport is to provide a service that is cost effective and actually *useful*. Making it faster for me to walk than catch the bus is not useful. Taxing the crap out of cars is not the answer since it unfairly hits all the people who can't use the bus for whatever reason (no bus service, disability, needing to transport large objects, etc)
increase registration fees for vehicles that get more milage
Yes, because penalising people for buying mroe environmentally friendly cars is a great idea...
Other than that, I agree with you about increasing fuel tax (which correctly penalises those who have less efficient cars). GPS tracking is a waste of time since it would cost a reasonable amount to put the infrastructure in place and doesn't do anything to discourage the use of inefficient vehicles.
There is very little outcry from Americans about this, but the government does put a huge tax on our gas.
I keep hearing Americans whinge about the extortionate fuel prices and that they can't afford to fill up their cars, and yet fuel prices in the US are a _fraction_ of the price of fuel in Europe.
Why should I care if they know what I buy or where I drive?
What happens if the tracking shows that you were near a terrorist bombing... and the tracking also shows you were at the garden centre buying fertiliser. Maybe you weren't guilty, but with enough tracking there may well be plenty of "evidence" that makes you look guilty. And since the law enforcement authorities seem to be able to get away with *anything* at the mention of the "T" word you could well find yourself banged up in jail even though there's no solid evidence against you.
This is my problem with national databases - given enough data, innocent parties can look guilty. I.e. contrary to popular belief, DNA and fingerprints are *not* necessarilly unique - looking at the fingerprints of a small number of people who are already suspected of a crime is one thing, but given a database of *everyone's* finger prints I worry that innocent people will be dragged through the courts (and possibly convicted) purely because the database showed a match.
Didn't we pay taxes to build the roads in the first place? Will these fees be accompanied by the reduction of taxes, since they are getting transportation funding elsewhere?
A similar system has been proposed here in the UK - the government wanted to reduce fuel tax and use GPS tracking to charge per mile instead. Which is a plain stupid idea since fuel tax effectively charges per mile, plus:
1. Discourages use of inefficient vehicles
2. Doesn't require a vast tracking infrastructure costing vast amounts of money
3. Doesn't have any legal or civil rights implications to do with tracking people's whereabouts.
Of course, the US government can't get away with a huge tax on fuel because there is outcry from the Americans if it costs more than $10 to fill their huge SUVs. (I currently pay about 89 pence per litre of unleaded).
More to the point why do we even need a national ID card? It's a solution looking for a problem.
This is a debate that's currently going on here in the UK - the government wants to spend vast amounts of money on national ID cards in the name of "preventing terrorism" but have not yet managed to explain to anyone _how_ this prevents terrorism. It seems that pretty much everyone with a clue who's not an MP universally thinks it's a waste of money (including the security services!) and I have to agree with them.
As well as the financial implications of ID cards, there is the civil liberties problem - why should I be required to carry around ID to prove who I am? Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the security services? An ID card is just another thing to get lost or stolen, will I be thrown in jail if I don't have my ID card with me for whatever reason?
I keep thinking back to the old cold war movies. How we laughed at people being required to carry around their "papers" and being thrown in jail if their papers weren't in order. Look who's laughing now.
It seems to me that ever since 9/11 any mention of the word "terroism" by the government has just signalled an attempt to push through their own agenda while people are too busy panicing to notice.
As far as browsers that implement features outside the standard, I don't understand why the purists would want to count that against the browser's compliancy status.
The problem with supporting "extensions" is that people (who don't know any better) will use them. They then become a defacto standard which makes browsers that don't implement it render the page incorrectly and appear "buggy" to the layman.
We have already seen this problem with IE's non-standard extensions resulting in pages not rendering correctly in FireFox, Opera, etc. You wouldn't believe the number of times people tell me they don't use FireFox because it's buggy since it won't even render a website they regularly use (it doesn't matter to most users that the website was coded by a moron - if it works in IE and doesn't work in FireFox then as far as they are concerned that's a bug in FireFox).
Happilly, with the increase in use of non-IE browsers and mobile devices it seems that many webmasters are getting a clue. But we don't want to reverse that trend by promoting extensions.
That's sticky ground. Does writing a module, compiling it and distributing the object code constitute a "derivative work" of the Kernel? If so, then they are required to GPL it.
I think the opinion most people have is that it's very shakey ground and the only reason nVidia aren't pressured into releasing their drivers is because they happen to be pretty good at supporting the Linux world with their closed drivers.
I don't think anyone would have problems into pressuring a router manufacturer to release their code though.
There's an (heroic, in my opinion) effort to create drivers by reverse-engineering those used in Linux/MIPS-based routers via a cleanroom design.
If there are Linux drivers used on commercial routers, aren't they required to GPL them? (since they would be part of the kernel)
But you want me to use the stable whatever last version of Red Hat/Fedora came out. 9.something was it from 1999?
The latest official stable RedHat supported distribution (RHEL 4) was released on Feb 15th 2005.
The latest stable Fedora Core release (Fedora Core 4) was released on 13th June 2005.
What point are you trying to make please?
3) Turn off SSID broadcasting.
Pointless - no increased security here, move along.
Linux on the Desktop? Not if the user has a wireless card.
The problem with the wireless hardware is that:
1. Most of the manufacturers haven't released any specs so the driver writing has needed lots of reverse engineering.
2. Much of the hardware has gone through rapid development cycles, meaning that by the time the drivers are available you probably can't get the hardware anymore.
3. Linked with (2), many of the manufacturers sell their updated revisions under the same name, model number and even FCCID in some cases, even though the new revision is *completely* incompatable with the old revision, so you may end up researching which hardware will work only to find that when you buy that hardware is is an incompatable revision.
4. Most cards require uploadable firmware which the manufacturers won't release under good licences so can't be shipped with most linux distributions as standard so you have to download it yourself.
The Prism54 drivers are a good example of (2) and (3) - the drivers were of good quality but by the time they made it into the stock kernel Intersil had stopped making the supported chipset and had replaced it with a completely incompatable SoftMAC based chipset. A number of the manufacturers, such as SMC, released the cards using the SoftMAC chipset under the same name and model number as the old ones and it was nigh on impossible to know which version you were going to end up with because even the retailers didn't know there were 2 incompatable versions of the same card.
I understand that the new Prism54 drivers now support the SoftMAC chipsets so maybe I'll fetch the incompatable SMC card I ended up with off the shelf. Interestingly, the Prism54 website says they're working on an open GPL firmware and I hope they succeed in producing it as that means we can at last have some hardware *completely* supported by a vanilla kernel. Having GPLed firmware also opens up some possibilities for new uses for the hardware since interested parties can hack the firmware to do strange new things (enhanced Mesh networking, etc?)
Speaking from experience of setting up supported Prism54 802.11g cards under both Fedora 3 and 4, it's simply a case of grabbing the firmware and sticking it in the right place and then it Just Works - you can't get a lot easier than that unless the distributor breaks the firmware licence and bundles the firmware illegally.
The last time I installed Fedora Core 4 off a boot CD I was amazed that to do an ftp install I still had to punch in manually what mirror I wanted to do the install from. Computer games have been grabbing "master server lists" for some time now. Can't something similar be worked into the FTP install?
Maybe you don't want to install off one of the official mirrors?
As more people start using wireless it becomes pretty obvious that improving the infastructure of wireless networks really is the next big step
Well it doesn't seem like rocket science to create a standard allowing foreign access points to negotiate with eachother for collision-free use of the bandwidth (in situations where the APs can see eachother). An even nicer idea would be to make all of the nodes into an ad-hoc mesh - keep the normal star topology with access points in the middle but edge client nodes could relay management messages between two APs if the APs couldn't see eachother.
And of course, extending the idea further, it's not just management data that could be spread over a mesh - you could use foreign access points as relays for your network. If they're on the same channels then there's no reduction in bandwidth caused by relaying 3rd party data.
You'd keep the logical networks separate of course, using some encryption. So you'd end up with a mesh of nodes relaying data for multiple encrypted vlans and still probably have better performance than current systems since they can interoperate to control collisions.
Minor point, I think the act was used by the police to prevent him from re-entering. They just used regular bouncers to eject him.
You are correct - the bouncers ejected (read: assaulted) him and then the police "detained" him under the anti-terrorism laws.
Then to add insult to injury, Blair still tried to push through a law that would allow the police to detain anyone for 90 days without charge, defending it by saying the police were very responsible and would never abuse a law.
This is a prime example of why excessively broad laws are always a bad idea - whilest it may improve the ability to legitimately target people doing wrong it will always be abused by someone as well.
Through all the IRA attacks whilest I was young the constant message delivered by the UK government was that if we changed the way we lived because of terrorism then the terrorists have won... well I guess we know who's won now then don't we? (Amazingly enough, Blair used the "if terrorism changes the way we live then they've won" speech in a justification of curtailing civil liberties in the name of anti-terrorism!)