Re:Every bit of business sense
on
WiFi Free-For-All
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Those cafes sure don't get more business when they come across asshole road warriors like me who park next to the building and check their e-mail without getting out of the car.
heh heh heh
Re:Not only cost, but what about security?
on
WiFi Free-For-All
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Too bad for the lay user, but I think from a legal standpoint it's fair to to say that people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy when they broadcast things over radio frequencies. If I used a business's cordless phone to have a conversation in the bathroom and someone happened to intercept the signal, the business wouldn't be liable. I think the same situation applies to wireless networks.
Besides, you don't have any more reason to expect someone isn't grabbing your packets on an unencrypted wireless network than if you were on a copper wire network that is hubbed rather than switched. The only difference on a wireless network is that it could be the next-door neighbor - nobody has to physically walk in and plug a cable into your hub. This isn't much of a difference when you're sitting at a public place such as an airport or coffee shop.
I remember back in high school I was finishing up a paper around 4AM. My roommate was up working on homework too, so I didn't think anything about pringing my paper out on my old impact printer.
A few minutes later ther was a knock on the door. Turns out I had woken up the guys on either side of me plus both of the people in the room above. This through remarkably well insulated walls for a dormitory.
While it's true that most late-and-all-nighters are a result of procrastination, I don't think it's fair to assume that this is always the case.
When I was in college, there were a few times where my workload got so large that I found myself working 'till 4AM and getting 4 hours of sleep a night for weeks straight. (Granted, I had an office in the CS hall that year, so instead of keeping my roommate up at night I just went days at a time without seeing him.)
I've also seen several professors hand a student huge piles of work, due tomorrow, on the same day.
The trend I've been seeing in the US is to have cafes with wireless access points. In most, they are free. Some want money - of these, the two types I have seen are a subscription service and a jar for people to throw a couple bucks in on their honor if they use the internet access. I've never paid for subscription service - most just want too much money. I'm not going to spend $12/month (the cheapest I've seen) to surf the internet for half an hour or an hour while I drink my coffee. The places I've seen that just ask you to throw some cash in a jar never had empty jars, so I'm sure it was enough money to cover the cost of the internet connection.
Oftentimes there is a computer or two for people without laptops, but those aren't used much.
I think the big problem with interet cafes in the USA is that most people own internet connections at home, so they aren't going to go out to do it. They're much more popular near reasonably-sized colleges and universities, where students will go to study.
My roommate and I had this problem when we were in college, too. We ended up solving the problem by rearranging the room so that there was not line-of-sight from the beds to the desks by placing the back of the desk towards each bed. We also bought some styrofoam insulation and put it between the beds and the desks, and hung comforters alongside the desk if someone was going to be up late. This damped the noise quite a bit, and blocked the light.
Before that, we bought a quieter keyboard (and just shared it between both computers) and turned the brightness on our monitors way down - in a dark room, there's plenty of light to see a monitor that's set too dark to be able to see well during the day. This helped a bit, but not enough.
I wouldn't say that Einstein was necessarily wrong.
He did spend the rest of his days trying to disprove or find a way around the uncertainty principle, but he wasn't trying to argue that quantum mechanics is wrong - heck, he helped develop quantum mechanics. My understanding is that he believed that uncertainity was a result of a model that is not 100% correct, which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for the guy who came up with the model that replaced Newtonian physics to believe. That, and it seems reasonable to me to believe that, for example, when a photon is emitted, there is a certain time at which that photon is emmitted rather than just an open set of points in time such that the photon emitted at one of these points, but not at any specific one.
I think that the fact that physicists are currently putting lots of effort into searching for a grand unified theory that can explain everything on both a quantum and a macro scale serves as a pretty good argument that Einstein wasn't off in thinking this. The fact of the matter is that we really don't know exactly what is going on here - at both the cosmological and quantum scale we're at the limits of our ability to gather empirical data, but observations at both ends of the scale suggest that there's stuff going on that we can't detect right now, so it's likely that both models will have to be at least partially scrapped at some time in the future.
That said, it doesn't mean that there's necessarily any truth behind dark matter and dark energy - they might just turn out to be the 20th century's version of ether.
I don't think it has to do anything to the thundercloud. If I remember right, hailstones form as the water falls from the could, not inside the cloud itself.
I'm assuming that the sonic pulse is supposed to somehow agitate the falling water to keep it from forming large ice crystals so they melt once they get to the lower (and warmer) atmosphere. Or something like that. I'm too lazy to read too deeply into the company's website.
Either way, they claim a 100% success rate, and if Nissan is willing to buy them I imagine that they have evidence to back it up. It doesn't seem that it would be impossible to prove the product works - most hailstorms are larger than the 0.3 mile radius effective range they claim. If you can repeatedly show hailstorms with a small hail-free patch surrounding the device, I'd say there's significant evidence that this isn't just a bunch of baloney.
This wouldn't stop precipitation from happening, it's supposed to just stop the precipitation from forming hailstones. You'd get rain instead.
I doubt it's going to become much of a problem, either. With these things generating a 120db noise every 5 seconds, you're not going to see too many of them in populated areas - as the article says, they're mostly used by farmers to protect their fields.
neither is important the only thing that matters is that you're in love and if that's true then she'll enjoy herself no matter what and maybe if you swing your small axe very well or the motion in the puddle is pleasing it helps some but really its all just myth women don't care lalalalalalalalalalalalal i'm not listening lalalalalalalalala
I have no idea specifically what is meant by a CPU controlling its own clock speed - for all I know that just means the clock and CPU are on a single IC rather than split across the chipset.
The article said Pentium. I think this makes it fair to assume they mean Pentium, not Pentium Pro, not Pentium II, not Pentium III. . . you get the picture.
If someone steals a TV, then goes and sells it to a resale shop, do we consider the owner of the resale shop to be a TV thief?
Then why the FUCK do we hold the reseller of a product they neither designed nor manufactured liable for patent infringement?
If there were any sense at all to the American legal system, there wouldn't be this stupid tangle of a case because it would never make it to a judge - the court's clerk would be allowed to immediately burn the motion and sprinkle its ashes in whatever drug and cleaning agent cocktail the company's lawyer was drinking at the time.
I gotta say, making the losing party pay would reduce the number of lawsuits signifigantly. Nobody would ever sue anybody who was much richer than themselves, no small companies would sue large companies, and no individuals would sue any companies. Conversely, at the merest hint of a lawsuit, the small fish would always raise the white flag before anything ever got filed. On top of that, nobody would ever try to invent anything unless it were under the auspices of some megafirm, for fear of violating some megafirm's portfolio of patents.
Now if we had some sort of law crafted to avoid lawsuit by attrition, I'd be more interested.
Considering that even all the huge companies have business models based around patents. At least, I assume they do, considering that IBM has ~25,000 active patents (Including a record of about 3,400 awarded in 2001), and numbers I've heard for other huge companies are also astronomical.
To these companies, owning lots of patents on lots of sometimes crazy things is a way of protecting their turf and a good way of putting potential competitors out of business. If they try to tighten up U.S. patent law, they'll only be making their job harder. Besides, I imagine that the amount of money they lose off most these lawsuits is chicken-scratch compared to their coffers.
It says in the article that Patriot's patent was issued last summer. Pentium chips have been around since the mid-90's. Doesn't this make for a ridiculously clear case of prior art?
The day after an all-night Quake marathon, I tend to have problems with constantly running, going around corners sideways, and jumping incessantly whenever other people are in the room.
I actually read a case study on the whole D&D scare.
Apparently, it all stems from a news article about how such-and-such percent of kids who play D&D commit suicide. The case study talks about the hysteria about D&D a bit. It then proceeds to mention that the reporter who wrote the article did bad research, and that she got the suicide factor completely wrong - it was actually TWICE what she reported. On top of that, this doubled suicide rate was still signifigantly lower than the national average suicide rate among kids of the same age group. (I don't remember the exact numbers, but we're not talking just statistically signifigant, we're talking there should have been news stories encouraging parents to buy their children copies of D&D to keep them from killing themselves.)
This seems to be the case with kids and violence. The violent crime and murder rates among kids has been steadily dropping for most of the past century. Granted, back in the '40s kids used knives rather than guns, but I gather that there was a greater cultural stigma against guns back then. The fact still remains that despite what the news says, kids are getting less violent overall, not more violent.
That was part of the joke, although I do find it kind of silly that the pods broke out. An array of anti-g pods shouldn't put any more stress on the ship's frame than an array of thrusters. They just didn't secure 'em well enough.
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Those cafes sure don't get more business when they come across asshole road warriors like me who park next to the building and check their e-mail without getting out of the car.
heh heh heh
Too bad for the lay user, but I think from a legal standpoint it's fair to to say that people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy when they broadcast things over radio frequencies. If I used a business's cordless phone to have a conversation in the bathroom and someone happened to intercept the signal, the business wouldn't be liable. I think the same situation applies to wireless networks.
Besides, you don't have any more reason to expect someone isn't grabbing your packets on an unencrypted wireless network than if you were on a copper wire network that is hubbed rather than switched. The only difference on a wireless network is that it could be the next-door neighbor - nobody has to physically walk in and plug a cable into your hub. This isn't much of a difference when you're sitting at a public place such as an airport or coffee shop.
I remember back in high school I was finishing up a paper around 4AM. My roommate was up working on homework too, so I didn't think anything about pringing my paper out on my old impact printer.
A few minutes later ther was a knock on the door. Turns out I had woken up the guys on either side of me plus both of the people in the room above. This through remarkably well insulated walls for a dormitory.
While it's true that most late-and-all-nighters are a result of procrastination, I don't think it's fair to assume that this is always the case.
When I was in college, there were a few times where my workload got so large that I found myself working 'till 4AM and getting 4 hours of sleep a night for weeks straight. (Granted, I had an office in the CS hall that year, so instead of keeping my roommate up at night I just went days at a time without seeing him.)
I've also seen several professors hand a student huge piles of work, due tomorrow, on the same day.
It's college. Shit happens in college.
The trend I've been seeing in the US is to have cafes with wireless access points. In most, they are free. Some want money - of these, the two types I have seen are a subscription service and a jar for people to throw a couple bucks in on their honor if they use the internet access. I've never paid for subscription service - most just want too much money. I'm not going to spend $12/month (the cheapest I've seen) to surf the internet for half an hour or an hour while I drink my coffee. The places I've seen that just ask you to throw some cash in a jar never had empty jars, so I'm sure it was enough money to cover the cost of the internet connection.
Oftentimes there is a computer or two for people without laptops, but those aren't used much.
I think the big problem with interet cafes in the USA is that most people own internet connections at home, so they aren't going to go out to do it. They're much more popular near reasonably-sized colleges and universities, where students will go to study.
My roommate and I had this problem when we were in college, too. We ended up solving the problem by rearranging the room so that there was not line-of-sight from the beds to the desks by placing the back of the desk towards each bed. We also bought some styrofoam insulation and put it between the beds and the desks, and hung comforters alongside the desk if someone was going to be up late. This damped the noise quite a bit, and blocked the light.
Before that, we bought a quieter keyboard (and just shared it between both computers) and turned the brightness on our monitors way down - in a dark room, there's plenty of light to see a monitor that's set too dark to be able to see well during the day. This helped a bit, but not enough.
I wouldn't say that Einstein was necessarily wrong.
He did spend the rest of his days trying to disprove or find a way around the uncertainty principle, but he wasn't trying to argue that quantum mechanics is wrong - heck, he helped develop quantum mechanics. My understanding is that he believed that uncertainity was a result of a model that is not 100% correct, which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for the guy who came up with the model that replaced Newtonian physics to believe. That, and it seems reasonable to me to believe that, for example, when a photon is emitted, there is a certain time at which that photon is emmitted rather than just an open set of points in time such that the photon emitted at one of these points, but not at any specific one.
I think that the fact that physicists are currently putting lots of effort into searching for a grand unified theory that can explain everything on both a quantum and a macro scale serves as a pretty good argument that Einstein wasn't off in thinking this. The fact of the matter is that we really don't know exactly what is going on here - at both the cosmological and quantum scale we're at the limits of our ability to gather empirical data, but observations at both ends of the scale suggest that there's stuff going on that we can't detect right now, so it's likely that both models will have to be at least partially scrapped at some time in the future.
That said, it doesn't mean that there's necessarily any truth behind dark matter and dark energy - they might just turn out to be the 20th century's version of ether.
I don't think it has to do anything to the thundercloud. If I remember right, hailstones form as the water falls from the could, not inside the cloud itself.
I'm assuming that the sonic pulse is supposed to somehow agitate the falling water to keep it from forming large ice crystals so they melt once they get to the lower (and warmer) atmosphere. Or something like that. I'm too lazy to read too deeply into the company's website.
Either way, they claim a 100% success rate, and if Nissan is willing to buy them I imagine that they have evidence to back it up. It doesn't seem that it would be impossible to prove the product works - most hailstorms are larger than the 0.3 mile radius effective range they claim. If you can repeatedly show hailstorms with a small hail-free patch surrounding the device, I'd say there's significant evidence that this isn't just a bunch of baloney.
This wouldn't stop precipitation from happening, it's supposed to just stop the precipitation from forming hailstones. You'd get rain instead.
I doubt it's going to become much of a problem, either. With these things generating a 120db noise every 5 seconds, you're not going to see too many of them in populated areas - as the article says, they're mostly used by farmers to protect their fields.
That said, I'm really curious if it even works.
I can see this ending marriages when customers who use this product suddenly catch their wives calling the mailman "gigantor."
neither is important the only thing that matters is that you're in love and if that's true then she'll enjoy herself no matter what and maybe if you swing your small axe very well or the motion in the puddle is pleasing it helps some but really its all just myth women don't care lalalalalalalalalalalalal i'm not listening lalalalalalalalala
I have no idea specifically what is meant by a CPU controlling its own clock speed - for all I know that just means the clock and CPU are on a single IC rather than split across the chipset.
The article said Pentium. I think this makes it fair to assume they mean Pentium, not Pentium Pro, not Pentium II, not Pentium III. . . you get the picture.
If someone steals a TV, then goes and sells it to a resale shop, do we consider the owner of the resale shop to be a TV thief?
Then why the FUCK do we hold the reseller of a product they neither designed nor manufactured liable for patent infringement?
If there were any sense at all to the American legal system, there wouldn't be this stupid tangle of a case because it would never make it to a judge - the court's clerk would be allowed to immediately burn the motion and sprinkle its ashes in whatever drug and cleaning agent cocktail the company's lawyer was drinking at the time.
I think we celebrate 'cause he's, like, a guy named Guy, you know? I mean, that's pretty gnarly, man.
Justin Timberlake did. Duh.
Unfortunately, with this case the formula has now become:
1. ?????
2. ?????
3. PROFIT!
I gotta say, making the losing party pay would reduce the number of lawsuits signifigantly. Nobody would ever sue anybody who was much richer than themselves, no small companies would sue large companies, and no individuals would sue any companies. Conversely, at the merest hint of a lawsuit, the small fish would always raise the white flag before anything ever got filed. On top of that, nobody would ever try to invent anything unless it were under the auspices of some megafirm, for fear of violating some megafirm's portfolio of patents.
Now if we had some sort of law crafted to avoid lawsuit by attrition, I'd be more interested.
Considering that even all the huge companies have business models based around patents. At least, I assume they do, considering that IBM has ~25,000 active patents (Including a record of about 3,400 awarded in 2001), and numbers I've heard for other huge companies are also astronomical.
To these companies, owning lots of patents on lots of sometimes crazy things is a way of protecting their turf and a good way of putting potential competitors out of business. If they try to tighten up U.S. patent law, they'll only be making their job harder. Besides, I imagine that the amount of money they lose off most these lawsuits is chicken-scratch compared to their coffers.
It says in the article that Patriot's patent was issued last summer.
Pentium chips have been around since the mid-90's.
Doesn't this make for a ridiculously clear case of prior art?
The day after an all-night Quake marathon, I tend to have problems with constantly running, going around corners sideways, and jumping incessantly whenever other people are in the room.
I actually read a case study on the whole D&D scare.
Apparently, it all stems from a news article about how such-and-such percent of kids who play D&D commit suicide. The case study talks about the hysteria about D&D a bit. It then proceeds to mention that the reporter who wrote the article did bad research, and that she got the suicide factor completely wrong - it was actually TWICE what she reported. On top of that, this doubled suicide rate was still signifigantly lower than the national average suicide rate among kids of the same age group. (I don't remember the exact numbers, but we're not talking just statistically signifigant, we're talking there should have been news stories encouraging parents to buy their children copies of D&D to keep them from killing themselves.)
This seems to be the case with kids and violence. The violent crime and murder rates among kids has been steadily dropping for most of the past century. Granted, back in the '40s kids used knives rather than guns, but I gather that there was a greater cultural stigma against guns back then. The fact still remains that despite what the news says, kids are getting less violent overall, not more violent.
(I guess
(everybody
(has to) (switch to)
LISP))
That was part of the joke, although I do find it kind of silly that the pods broke out. An array of anti-g pods shouldn't put any more stress on the ship's frame than an array of thrusters. They just didn't secure 'em well enough.
What we really need to do is develop an anti-gravity drive and build a huge Macross type ship.
yee-haw!
They wouldn't be buying Durangos and Escalades.