Was it so likely that a disability pensioner would be in jail before ever being convicted for something no one had yet received jail time for? Were they concerned that this disability pensioner was going to skip out on them?
That would depend on wheather or not he was scamming his disability pension.
I remember when I was first investigating what brand of CD-Rs to buy. I read an article on the differences between the dyes used in CD-Rs.
Don't remember the exact details, but it was something along the lines of the chemical combination used to make CD-Rs with green dye are better for single speed reading (eg. Audio CDs) but didn't last as long.
The chemicals used to make the silver/gold dye however were superior for data, and should last somewhere in the order of 20 years. I think blue dye was somewhere in between.
This similar article says gold dye CD-Rs have 100 year durability, and the cheaper green ones only have a 10 year life, but have been enhanced to give 20-50 years of service.
One of the worlds largest Voice of IP rollouts is almost complete at the Australian National University (ANU), with over 1500 handsets already installed. For more info see here.
The Quality of Service (QoS) issues (lag, jitter, etc) were overcome using tagged VLANs and prioritising voice over video and other general data traffic. The Gigabit eithernet backbone is in a meshed star topology, supposedly providing five 9's (99.999%) reliability. Multiple gateways connect the internal telephone system to the outside analogue world.
One could argue that this is a good decision since reverse engineering is economically inefficient. A reverse engineer is expending time and effort to try and "work out" what some else has already done.
When someone reverse engineers something they are imposing an (economic) externality on the creator, since notionally they are reducing the value of the initial product by using the creation to create a (possibly superior) supplementry product.
A much better solution would be for the reverse engineer to pay for the creator for the orginal design (say half of the costs it would take to reverse engineer). This would yield the same final outcome, with less effort, and each party better off (in monetary terms).
That said, this is kinda what the patent system is designed to do (disclose new design whilst granting a temporary monopoly). But the patent system has its problems, namely inflexible length of patent. So maybe reverse engineering is the lesser of two evils.
While it sounds like a great idea, I'm sceptical as to whether it will actually become widely used.
The big players have already claimed a significant section of the market. And the IM market is subject to the first mover effect (first in gets the biggest share) and the network effect (you need people to get people). It doesn't matter how good the protocol is, if there are only 10 other people you can talk to with it, it is not of much use.
Not to meantion that Microsoft's Messenger (*shudder*), comes stock standard with Windows XP, and is a "built in feature", just like the DOJ thing with IE. I wasn't able to purge it from my system, through any control panel, but had to locate the directory and remove it the old fashioned way. Sadly I think this is far beyond the skills of your average GUI-domesticated user, so people will just end up using it.
If you could get the major IM clients to conform to the protcol everything would be fine and dandy, but good luck with that....
We my only have 0.3% of the global population, and 2.6% of the worlds internet users , but apparantly we recieve 16% of the worlds spam.
http://www.caube.org.au/australia.htm
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That would depend on wheather or not he was scamming his disability pension.
And what kind of dye did the CDs use?
I remember when I was first investigating what brand of CD-Rs to buy. I read an article on the differences between the dyes used in CD-Rs.
Don't remember the exact details, but it was something along the lines of the chemical combination used to make CD-Rs with green dye are better for single speed reading (eg. Audio CDs) but didn't last as long. The chemicals used to make the silver/gold dye however were superior for data, and should last somewhere in the order of 20 years. I think blue dye was somewhere in between.
This similar article says gold dye CD-Rs have 100 year durability, and the cheaper green ones only have a 10 year life, but have been enhanced to give 20-50 years of service.
Since they don't include any eye-witness accounts, I'm a little skeptical about their claims.
One of the worlds largest Voice of IP rollouts is almost complete at the Australian National University (ANU), with over 1500 handsets already installed. For more info see here.
The Quality of Service (QoS) issues (lag, jitter, etc) were overcome using tagged VLANs and prioritising voice over video and other general data traffic. The Gigabit eithernet backbone is in a meshed star topology, supposedly providing five 9's (99.999%) reliability. Multiple gateways connect the internal telephone system to the outside analogue world.
Looks like Africa has some competition.
One could argue that this is a good decision since reverse engineering is economically inefficient. A reverse engineer is expending time and effort to try and "work out" what some else has already done. When someone reverse engineers something they are imposing an (economic) externality on the creator, since notionally they are reducing the value of the initial product by using the creation to create a (possibly superior) supplementry product. A much better solution would be for the reverse engineer to pay for the creator for the orginal design (say half of the costs it would take to reverse engineer). This would yield the same final outcome, with less effort, and each party better off (in monetary terms). That said, this is kinda what the patent system is designed to do (disclose new design whilst granting a temporary monopoly). But the patent system has its problems, namely inflexible length of patent. So maybe reverse engineering is the lesser of two evils.
While it sounds like a great idea, I'm sceptical as to whether it will actually become widely used.
The big players have already claimed a significant section of the market. And the IM market is subject to the first mover effect (first in gets the biggest share) and the network effect (you need people to get people). It doesn't matter how good the protocol is, if there are only 10 other people you can talk to with it, it is not of much use.
Not to meantion that Microsoft's Messenger (*shudder*), comes stock standard with Windows XP, and is a "built in feature", just like the DOJ thing with IE. I wasn't able to purge it from my system, through any control panel, but had to locate the directory and remove it the old fashioned way. Sadly I think this is far beyond the skills of your average GUI-domesticated user, so people will just end up using it.
If you could get the major IM clients to conform to the protcol everything would be fine and dandy, but good luck with that....
Where's the cup holder?
We my only have 0.3% of the global population, and 2.6% of the worlds internet users , but apparantly we recieve 16% of the worlds spam. http://www.caube.org.au/australia.htm