Geiger counters are used to detect radiation (usually gamma and beta radiation, but some models can also detect alpha radiation).
Geiger-mueller counters respond to the commonly encountered types of radiation, namely, alpha and beta particles as well as gamma and x-radiation. However, GM counters cannot determine the type, energy, or vectors of the detected radiation.
They are generally much larger than this device and provide little in the way of discrimination by type.
Admittedly, Its almost impossible to make a loss selling each additional unit of software, since it costs next to nothing when an OEM pre-installs it from a single in house source.
A marginal load on the server for updates might occur I suppose.
Still to suggest that MS has a financial interest in getting you to believe your machine needs replacement, and it pursues this interest with shoddy software just seems a bit of a stretch.
They want to sell New Licenses of windows. The cost of a new machine raises a pretty high barrier to that additional copy. It just does not sound like even the most brain dead marketing droid would go down that path.
All the effort of developing Vista, Win 7, Security Essentials (free) have been aimed at cleaning up the mess they made for themselves over the years due to clinging to a fundamentally insecure design.
To now come out and claim it is their business plan to destroy the usefulness of your computer just seems like nonsense.
I've upgraded all my Linux machines too. Does that mean Linus Thorvald gets a cut of that somehow?
Ah, but the femtocell packet inspection is actually a brilliant concept.
The femtocell sits on your normal network, and putting it on a hub makes all of its traffic open to in-house packet inspection. Even if all you got was IP addresses that would be a start.
It may be encrypting traffic it places on the network, but it seems unlikely it would encrypt standard packet structures.
There is a difference between an ISP, in which the last mile data is over copper and fiber, and the cell plan, where the last mile data is over air.
Well said.
And that is the key piece that most just don't comprehend.
The Last Mile is already saturated in many places.
A tower, given our current technology can only handle so many cell phones at once, and the radio frequencies they use are in high demand, and the carrying capacity of each frequency is pretty much fixed by rules of physics.
Freeing broadcast television frequencies was designed to help this somewhat. It will take years before the handset inventory in people's pockets is upgraded to handle these new frequencies. But even then the frequencies freed up by TV broadcast are great for building penetration and range, but worse than current 3G frequencies for total data carrying capacity/data rates.
No, you are wrong. It is NOT a matter of Physics. I
I stopped reading right there.
Because it is most certainly a matter of Physics.
There is a maximum number of handsets a given tower can handle with its assigned spectrum. There is a maximum tower density before they interfere with each other. There is a maximum number of bits you can transfer over a given frequency in a given time frame.
And these maximums are routinely being hit today in many places. Just about any place with an event (ball game, emergency), near most high schools, and entire cities with restrictive NIMBY tower permitting.
You simply can not continuously add bandwidth demand to the last mile of a cellular network.
"software system" does not magically make something unique.
It is a patent for a unique software system.
There is no system exactly like this system which therefore makes it unique, no magic needed.
You can not market a Software System to manage Patents if it violates this patent.
If IBM did not restrict their patent to a particular platform then it is not so limited, and they can come out with an iphone version, a tablet version, etc, and nobody else can take IBM's system and tweak it for an iphone.
If IBM DID tie their patent to a specific platform (which would be really dumb) then you can patent something almost exactly the same but which runs on an iphone.
So basically this is a "metapatent." Someone should patent the idea of doing metapatents! And someone else should patent the idea of the idea of doing metapatents!
No its not.
Its a patent for a software system. Period. End of Story.
The Summary above is almost pure hype, based on an article that itself was mostly hype, leading to a perfect storm of hype.
(Maybe Hype Squared should be patented, at least we could go after these hypesters that post stories on Slashdot to troll anything relating to patents.)
You can''t release a piece of software that mimics ALL of IBMs claim, but that has nothing to do with patenting anything.
This law will be used to stop criticism and documentaries that show the rich and powerful in a bad light.
Impersonation is not a key element found in criticism or documentaries, so your assertion is baseless.
The bill also requires that a violator "credibly impersonates another actual person", so simply standing up and criticizingly another person is CLEARLY not covered.
Making a documentary (and even posting it on the web) with actors portraying another person is not covered because the it is not "credible impersonation", simply an Actor doing his job, which always comes with disclaimers.
Going on the web and posting attacks pretending to BE another "ACTUAL" person is not permitted
The law contains a significant mention of school districts, which leads me to believe it was not aimed at celebrities but rather at various forms of cyber bullying.
A download source is sufficient. Not even the most rabid FSF lawyer argues anything different.
It is a customary and usual method of source code distribution.
Further, this offer need not be printed (You made that up). It can simply be available in the help on screen in the device itself, such as you see in your Android phone when you look in Settings / About Phone / Legal information.
As mentioned in other threads, its rated medium, even tho a lot of people bitch about it.
That probably changes Monday morning since this hit the press (and not just SlashDot over the holiday in a big way.
Nothing succeeds like a little mainstream press in getting Google (and most other companies attention). If you want to speed things along, get your congressman to threaten to hold hearings.
The value of a text message is what ever the customer will pay for it. It has nothing at all to do with cost.
Android comes with Google Talk. It is Free (included in your data plan) and is not arbitrarily limited to 160 characters.
ON most cell networks, SMS messages utilize a signaling path that is used to notify phones of call arrival. (Specifically using the Mobile Application Part (MAP) of the SS7 protocol).
That path has a finite capacity. When that path is busy, calls go direct to voice mail without so much as a ring on your handset.
This type of traffic needs to be moved to the data plan instead of the network signaling path. Google Talk (which is simply Jabber) is the perfect tool for this and works across all platforms (cell phones, computers, tablets, etc).
I'm wondering if Handcent or other 3rd party apps are affected by this bug also or if its just in the Google app code only.
None of the other FREE (or paid) SMS apps have had this reported.
Further, its very rare, and complicated to reproduce this, unless you frequently have a lot of message threads between many people going on, and respond asynchronously.
"Darth Mo" posted how a specific a sequence of messages can cause this problem, and it seems to involve the Back Button on Android, after reading a message from one contact but then deciding to respond to a different prior message thread.
We simply either cant spend the money, wont spend the money or cant/wont approve new infrastructure projects that will ease the traffic burden.
Well perhaps an alternative view of Peak Car (the article was focused almost solely on car and had very little to say about other means of travel), is that public infrastructure IS finally getting attention in many cities to the point where car ownership and driving is not necessary.
Perhaps not in your example from NYC, but in many other places public transit has become responsive, cheap, and frequent enough that people are shifting their priorities. Seattle installed lite rail over the last several year, with 10 minute headways (train intervals), for cheaper than the price of parking.
Making neighborhoods livable is the next step. Instead of the supposed efficiency of huge supermarkets, a return to neighborhood markets in planned subdivisions makes more sense. Perhaps outlet stores of the major chains is the way to go. That way people could walk to the store for the eggs and milk and order the other stuff at the same trip or over the net, and pick it up locally instead of driving 20 miles.
Slashdot Mirror
Geiger counters are used to detect radiation (usually gamma and beta radiation, but some models can also detect alpha radiation).
Geiger-mueller counters respond to the commonly encountered types of radiation, namely, alpha and beta particles as well as gamma and x-radiation. However, GM counters cannot determine the type, energy, or vectors of the detected radiation.
They are generally much larger than this device and provide little in the way of discrimination by type.
If it is not news, then how is it this guy is the first to market with a device that will fit in your pocket?
Did you even read TFA?
She did a better analysis than most of the SCO lawyers.
Admittedly, Its almost impossible to make a loss selling each additional unit of software, since it costs next to nothing when an OEM pre-installs it from a single in house source.
A marginal load on the server for updates might occur I suppose.
Still to suggest that MS has a financial interest in getting you to believe your machine needs replacement, and it pursues this interest with shoddy software just seems a bit of a stretch.
They want to sell New Licenses of windows. The cost of a new machine raises a pretty high barrier to that additional copy. It just does not sound like even the most brain dead marketing droid would go down that path.
All the effort of developing Vista, Win 7, Security Essentials (free) have been aimed at cleaning up the mess they made for themselves over the years due to clinging to a fundamentally insecure design.
To now come out and claim it is their business plan to destroy the usefulness of your computer just seems like nonsense.
I've upgraded all my Linux machines too. Does that mean Linus Thorvald gets a cut of that somehow?
Ah, but the femtocell packet inspection is actually a brilliant concept.
The femtocell sits on your normal network, and putting it on a hub makes all of its traffic open to in-house packet inspection. Even if all you got was IP addresses that would be a start.
It may be encrypting traffic it places on the network, but it seems unlikely it would encrypt standard packet structures.
There is a difference between an ISP, in which the last mile data is over copper and fiber, and the cell plan, where the last mile data is over air.
Well said.
And that is the key piece that most just don't comprehend.
The Last Mile is already saturated in many places.
A tower, given our current technology can only handle so many cell phones at once, and the radio frequencies they use are in high demand, and the carrying capacity of each frequency is pretty much fixed by rules of physics.
Freeing broadcast television frequencies was designed to help this somewhat. It will take years before the handset inventory in people's pockets is upgraded to handle these new frequencies. But even then the frequencies freed up by TV broadcast are great for building penetration and range, but worse than current 3G frequencies for total data carrying capacity/data rates.
No, you are wrong. It is NOT a matter of Physics. I
I stopped reading right there.
Because it is most certainly a matter of Physics.
There is a maximum number of handsets a given tower can handle with its assigned spectrum. There is a maximum tower density before they interfere with each other. There is a maximum number of bits you can transfer over a given frequency in a given time frame.
And these maximums are routinely being hit today in many places. Just about any place with an event (ball game, emergency), near most high schools, and entire cities with restrictive NIMBY tower permitting.
You simply can not continuously add bandwidth demand to the last mile of a cellular network.
That seems a bit over the top, even for the anti microsoft crowd here on Slashdot.
Microsoft doesn't sell computers, and they make very little on OEM versions of Windows installed in the factory.
"Its a patent for a software system."
"software system" does not magically make something unique.
It is a patent for a unique software system.
There is no system exactly like this system which therefore makes it unique, no magic needed.
You can not market a Software System to manage Patents if it violates this patent.
If IBM did not restrict their patent to a particular platform then it is not so limited, and they can come out with an iphone version, a tablet version, etc, and nobody else can take IBM's system and tweak it for an iphone.
If IBM DID tie their patent to a specific platform (which would be really dumb) then you can patent something almost exactly the same but which runs on an iphone.
Go read the patent.
What about this is so hard to understand?
You idiot. They patented a software package. Thats all.
Thank you for that wall of text.
Did someone patent the paragraph break while I was asleep?
Exactly.
Its a computer system people.
Now can we just stop with the sophomoric posts about patenting rain and move on?
There never was a story here. They patented a software package. Thats all.
So basically this is a "metapatent." Someone should patent the idea of doing metapatents! And someone else should patent the idea of the idea of doing metapatents!
No its not.
Its a patent for a software system. Period. End of Story.
The Summary above is almost pure hype, based on an article that itself was mostly hype, leading to a perfect storm of hype.
(Maybe Hype Squared should be patented, at least we could go after these hypesters that post stories on Slashdot to troll anything relating to patents.)
You can''t release a piece of software that mimics ALL of IBMs claim, but that has nothing to do with patenting anything.
This law will be used to stop criticism and documentaries that show the rich and powerful in a bad light.
Impersonation is not a key element found in criticism or documentaries, so your assertion is baseless.
The bill also requires that a violator "credibly impersonates another actual person", so simply standing up and criticizingly another person is CLEARLY not covered.
Making a documentary (and even posting it on the web) with actors portraying another person is not covered because the it is not "credible impersonation", simply an Actor doing his job, which always comes with disclaimers.
Going on the web and posting attacks pretending to BE another "ACTUAL" person is not permitted
The law contains a significant mention of school districts, which leads me to believe it was not aimed at celebrities but rather at various forms of cyber bullying.
The key part not explained is whether the tech sellers asked for and obtained a licensing fee.
Just because China wanted to build in-country, doesn't mean anyone was ripped off.
Thank you for that paragraph explaining exactly what I said in one sentence.
A download source is sufficient. Not even the most rabid FSF lawyer argues anything different.
It is a customary and usual method of source code distribution.
Further, this offer need not be printed (You made that up). It can simply be available in the help on screen in the device itself, such as you see in your Android phone when you look in Settings / About Phone / Legal information.
Please stop posting FUD.
As mentioned in other threads, its rated medium, even tho a lot of people bitch about it.
That probably changes Monday morning since this hit the press (and not just SlashDot over the holiday in a big way.
Nothing succeeds like a little mainstream press in getting Google (and most other companies attention). If you want to speed things along, get your congressman to threaten to hold hearings.
and we have to try to keep the signal-to-noise ratio good here on Slashdot.
Right. Now please refrain from lecturing. Thanks for your cooperation. EOT.
It has ALREADY been fixed by the community.
None of the dozen or so SMS apps in the market exhibit this. Only the stock app.
The value of a text message is what ever the customer will pay for it. It has nothing at all to do with cost.
Android comes with Google Talk. It is Free (included in your data plan) and is not arbitrarily limited to 160 characters.
ON most cell networks, SMS messages utilize a signaling path that is used to notify phones of call arrival. (Specifically using the Mobile Application Part (MAP) of the SS7 protocol).
That path has a finite capacity. When that path is busy, calls go direct to voice mail without so much as a ring on your handset.
This type of traffic needs to be moved to the data plan instead of the network signaling path. Google Talk (which is simply Jabber) is the perfect tool for this and works across all platforms (cell phones, computers, tablets, etc).
I'm wondering if Handcent or other 3rd party apps are affected by this bug also or if its just in the Google app code only.
None of the other FREE (or paid) SMS apps have had this reported.
Further, its very rare, and complicated to reproduce this, unless you frequently have a lot of message threads between many people going on, and respond asynchronously.
"Darth Mo" posted how a specific a sequence of messages can cause this problem, and it seems to involve the Back Button on Android, after reading a message from one contact but then deciding to respond to a different prior message thread.
We simply either cant spend the money, wont spend the money or cant/wont approve new infrastructure projects that will ease the traffic burden.
Well perhaps an alternative view of Peak Car (the article was focused almost solely on car and had very little to say about other means of travel), is that public infrastructure IS finally getting attention in many cities to the point where car ownership and driving is not necessary.
Perhaps not in your example from NYC, but in many other places public transit has become responsive, cheap, and frequent enough that people are shifting their priorities. Seattle installed lite rail over the last several year, with 10 minute headways (train intervals), for cheaper than the price of parking.
Making neighborhoods livable is the next step. Instead of the supposed efficiency of huge supermarkets, a return to neighborhood markets in planned subdivisions makes more sense. Perhaps outlet stores of the major chains is the way to go. That way people could walk to the store for the eggs and milk and order the other stuff at the same trip or over the net, and pick it up locally instead of driving 20 miles.
...it'll be the corporations that name everything...
This just makes me so fucking sad. Everything in our future will be advertising.
Its human. Its what we do.
How come Microsoft gets to name an entire galaxy? I think this is another one of their b**s claims for "market share."
Sarcasm Warning.
That was Samsung that named an entire Galaxy.