"you were a nerd if you chatted with your friends via text".
When I was a kid, if you wanted to chat via text, you had to put it on a 5 1/2" floppy written in Basic and pass it to your friend. Sure there was IRC, but you had to hook up your 9600 baud modem to make it work.
I have been a gamer though throughout. Back then it was Brickout and Lode Runner. For me today it is SOCOM II (I am biased against Halo) and Doom and various RTS computer games. In my experience, the most successful games are 'social'. There is a community or clan that hangs out as much to be around other people like you and to be social, as anything else. Everquest works because of the group dynamic. The advent of voice communication makes that even more powerful, and makes computer games more like a fun phone call or chat line.
I can see the NSA administering this stuff, but the school needs a very simple and reliable information system or the administration by the building maintanance guy, who is more skilled at mowing the lawn and fixing the irrigation system, will fail. If the failure rate is high enough you can game the system, you can damage your RFID tag and say, 'look I broke it, see it doesn't work, BTW I have a perfect attendance record. You then talk to your Mom, and she will yell at the admin and the principle, and they will get sick of it and turn the damn thing off.
Unless you have a guy with an HK5 and body armor to check people in, NSA tech geeks and a huge IT budget this will fail as an all encompassing system.
Although, I have to say it would make going through the lunch line quick and easy.
Not necessarily, the mark of the beast is on the forehead or the right hand if I remember correctly, and the number 666 needs to get worked in there. I don't know exactly how that works, but it could be a unique mark.
I don't know what everyone is upset about. This is the perfect way to cut class. Have your buddy take your tag in and you have an official stamp that says you were there. This is a system so ripe for abuse I wish I were back in high school just to exploit it.
I'm an architect so I have some insight into this. Your example is much too simplistic.
Nailing four boards together into a square configuration is covered by patent law, not copyright law. All kinds of wall systems, paints and construction assemblies are patented all the time. Just about the only thing that isn't patented is a 2x4. Even some brick glazings and concrete admixtures are patented. Unless you are in manufactured housing however, it is almost impossible to patent an entire building, because every building is unique in some way and most of the techniques are based on principles which are hundreds of years old.
As far as copying someone else's blueprints, in architecture the owner is entitled to use the architects design as long as the owner pays the architect for his services, that doesn't mean he always has access to the drawings to copy them. In architecture, the design and the drawings are separate entities. The drawings are copyrighted and owned by the architect, the design is an interpretation of the drawings by the architect, the contractor carries out the means and methods by which the design is implemented, the owner 'owns' the product or building, provides the land and money for that building to built and tells the architect what the building is supposed to do and pays his fees.
When an architect gets fired, he is to be paid for the services he has rendered, and then a new designer picks up where he left off by redrawing everything for himself and carrying on from there, most architects however will loan their drawings to the new architect as a professional courtesy for them to redraw from, sometimes they are obligated to do this under their contract. All architects used to write in their contracts that you couldn't use their design if they were fired, but this was thrown out in court about 70 years ago, and marked the end of the old school profession.
Needless to say, architecture is a high stakes profession at times. Sometimes billions of dollars exchange hands in complicated deals that equal/exceed anything that typically happens in the software profession, involving an owner, architect, contractor, local government, state government, federal government, banks, lenders, shareholders, consultants, tenants, utility companies, suppliers and manufacturers and so on and so forth. All of this must be accomplished with very low failure tolerance, any one of these issues can stop a project dead in its tracks. Take the New World Trade Center project for example, it must be a nighmare to organize that based on the infrastructure alone. The only reason this comes together at all is because everyone has an implicit and explicit understanding what they are supposed to do and they get paid. I think the main problem with software is that there isn't a long tradition of making software. People don't know what is practical or traditional, so they think up and imagine all kinds of ways to give themselves leverage in confusing ways. This creates a minefield of problems specifically intended to bring ruin to another party and make vast amounts of money for very little work. I would wager there are more lawsuits in the building industry, but the overall risk level is lower because those risks are insured for one, and two, people know what to expect and performance and benefit can easily be measured (did that wall fall down, does that roof leak, is there mold in the ductwork, was I paid what I was worth, etc.) and we have 10,000 years of building experience to rely on. Software has about 50 years of relevant history.
In software, who owns what isn't easily established, it isn't a standard practice, no one knows what anything means or what it is truly worth. What is a graphical tree interface worth, I have no idea? Is it worth $1 billion or $1.99, who knows? Compare that to architecture, where even if there is no contract signed, typical business practices are so strong that a contract is always implied and everyone is always held to known standards.
It seems like a decent value to me considering what it is for. You can drive around in a truck along a pipeline and have a wireless access point at each pump station which will indicate its status. You can be at a chemical plant and wirelessly place monitoring equipment. If you are on a large construction site or mining operation a central computer will know when your truck, excavation equipment or hauler will need more fuel because you can broadcast that data. This has obvious implications for ports, distribution centers and manufacturing. This is a low cost, off the shelf industrial utility that can connect to any network, it is not designed for handling large data streams because that would make it expensive, but small streams with specific data make it cheap, $90 for a ten pack seems cheap. Combine this with GPS and RFID and you have any number of civilian and military applications. Check out this link.
My favorite theoretical use would be a monitoring device. Hook it up in a car with GPS and wire it for sound and a camera and you can set up a web page to watch it all from the other side of the world if you want, and if it is wired into the cars computer you would know how fast he was going, whether or not he needed an oil change and what radio station he was listening to.
I think it is more correct to compare this person to someone peeking through your window to see what kind of books you have on your bookshelve
Sorry bub, but that is against the law in addition to being socially unacceptable. It is one thing to look into a storefront, another entirely to creep onto my property and peek in my bedroom to see my what kind of pr0n is on my bookcase. If I happen to lounge in the living room with my lady friend who is dressed like an angel in lace and wearing a Richard Nixon mask and has me chained to a post, naked, while she whips my ass and tells me what a bad Democrat I have been, I don't think some random dude has the right to see that, I don't care if he was curious about my reading habits. If people do that to me, I am inclined to pull out my shotgun and tell them to get the hell off of my land. In some states I am fully empowered to pull the trigger, and will be roundly congratulated if the person shot is a freak, a wierdo or a deviant. Its self defense. Not even the FBI is empowered to sneak and peek without a warrant. That kind of communist thinking doesn't belong in the USA.
Anywhere private information is kept is off limits by social convention first, and by the law second. If we can't have privacy, we can't have freedom.
A computer is personal property. You do not have a right to tresspass on personal property. If you both tresspass and cause damage, you are liable for both infractions. This isn't complicated.
A good prosecutor can convict anyone, don't screw with the cops, if they really want you to burn, you will burn. And as you may know, the prison version of IANAL is simply ANAL. This is why most people plead out 90% of the time.
The cop will wait until the kid comes across an unlocked door, rummages through the car, and takes something. Then the cop will arrest him
That depends, if the cop just wants to scare the kid straight, he will go up to him, explain that if he catches him messing around he will kick his ass and send him to jail and that he knows his name and where he lives. Hopefully the kid will get the message, a crime will not be committed and the kid will no become a criminal.
The annoying thing is how mainstream press translates this into - "Linux allegedly violating Unix copyrights"
And now the mainstream press will read that the copyright allegations fell on their ass, were beaten up by United Auto Workers from Detroit, were bound and shackled with German precision, locked in the trunk of a Hemi powered mini van and dumped in a canal. They got ass whooped and if there is one thing Americans hate, it is pathetic losers. Down they go.
M$ is a dominant player in a large, industry among other large industries, in a large country among other large countries in a world filled with industries large and small. M$ has a decent amount of power, but they don't have much influence outside of technology. They aren't even 1% of our economy. If the US government woke up tommorrow and decided to crush the M$ monopoly by passing laws and making things difficult, M$ would melt. They are big, but they aren't that garganuanly huge enough to span the entire country, only Wal-Mart is that big.
You are saying that it is less profitable to sell 10 low bandwidth users a service at $30 than one high bandwidth user at $210, even if the bandwidth usage is the same? That doesn't work by my math. I think you are backwards.
From a business perspective it is better to squeeze a higher overall fee from the same equipment and inf5rastructure. That is why it makes business sense for the phone companies to screw the high bandwidth users over and give low bandwidth users the options of a wide pipe when they need it. The high bandwidth users always have their pipe closer to being maxed out, if you give them a bigger pipe they will use more bandwidth. The low bandwidth user will max out their bandwidth for a much shorter duration (like when they download a movie trailer or i-tunes purchased music). When you add up average bandwidth usage over time, the average low usage consumer doesn't consume nearly as much, maybe a tenth or even less when compared to band width hogs. This way, the company can give out extremely high bandwidth connections for cheap, mostly because the consumer will never fully use it, but the consumer still has the comfort and convenience of a high bandwidth connection.
This doesn't really compare to airline business model, it is more like the insurance business, where most of the time it isn't needed but when it is needed it is needed in a big way. That model depends on it not being used. The more it is utilized, the higher the cost.
The have about $61mil. But they are hemhorraging cash, they have about $4 per share in cash and are losing $1 a share per quarter. I give them a year before their back is to the wall and someone has to bail them out (M$). 54% of their available stock is being shorted right now if that gives you any indication of what people think, that is approaching the level of a Worldcom or Enron as they tanked.
yahoo finance
I am not sure that is true. Anyone who is going to pay $210/month is going to use their bandwidth is going to be a heavy user, probably maxing out a lot of the time and at peak usage times for the telecom. $30 people on the other hand has aunt susie who only downloads movie trailers a couple times a month, maybe buys a few songs from i-tunes. Those are the people you want, the people who have brief but intense need for bandwidth, they are cheap to keep. The bandwidth hogs are the expensive ones.
The 10 people who probably did not sign up in your scenario, at $30 a month would equal $300, the cost to support them may be roughly equal to your single $210 heavy use person because they use very little bandwidth, they don't host web pages, they don't use p2p. In my mind that is an extra $90/month in pure profit. Fiber is potentially a competitive advantage that the phone company can install at any time to get an edge over cable because it can do everything cable does only better.
Slashdot Mirror
"you were a nerd if you chatted with your friends via text".
When I was a kid, if you wanted to chat via text, you had to put it on a 5 1/2" floppy written in Basic and pass it to your friend. Sure there was IRC, but you had to hook up your 9600 baud modem to make it work.
I have been a gamer though throughout. Back then it was Brickout and Lode Runner. For me today it is SOCOM II (I am biased against Halo) and Doom and various RTS computer games. In my experience, the most successful games are 'social'. There is a community or clan that hangs out as much to be around other people like you and to be social, as anything else. Everquest works because of the group dynamic. The advent of voice communication makes that even more powerful, and makes computer games more like a fun phone call or chat line.
I can see the NSA administering this stuff, but the school needs a very simple and reliable information system or the administration by the building maintanance guy, who is more skilled at mowing the lawn and fixing the irrigation system, will fail. If the failure rate is high enough you can game the system, you can damage your RFID tag and say, 'look I broke it, see it doesn't work, BTW I have a perfect attendance record. You then talk to your Mom, and she will yell at the admin and the principle, and they will get sick of it and turn the damn thing off. Unless you have a guy with an HK5 and body armor to check people in, NSA tech geeks and a huge IT budget this will fail as an all encompassing system. Although, I have to say it would make going through the lunch line quick and easy.
Not necessarily, the mark of the beast is on the forehead or the right hand if I remember correctly, and the number 666 needs to get worked in there. I don't know exactly how that works, but it could be a unique mark.
I don't know what everyone is upset about. This is the perfect way to cut class. Have your buddy take your tag in and you have an official stamp that says you were there. This is a system so ripe for abuse I wish I were back in high school just to exploit it.
I'm an architect so I have some insight into this. Your example is much too simplistic.
Nailing four boards together into a square configuration is covered by patent law, not copyright law. All kinds of wall systems, paints and construction assemblies are patented all the time. Just about the only thing that isn't patented is a 2x4. Even some brick glazings and concrete admixtures are patented. Unless you are in manufactured housing however, it is almost impossible to patent an entire building, because every building is unique in some way and most of the techniques are based on principles which are hundreds of years old.
As far as copying someone else's blueprints, in architecture the owner is entitled to use the architects design as long as the owner pays the architect for his services, that doesn't mean he always has access to the drawings to copy them. In architecture, the design and the drawings are separate entities. The drawings are copyrighted and owned by the architect, the design is an interpretation of the drawings by the architect, the contractor carries out the means and methods by which the design is implemented, the owner 'owns' the product or building, provides the land and money for that building to built and tells the architect what the building is supposed to do and pays his fees.
When an architect gets fired, he is to be paid for the services he has rendered, and then a new designer picks up where he left off by redrawing everything for himself and carrying on from there, most architects however will loan their drawings to the new architect as a professional courtesy for them to redraw from, sometimes they are obligated to do this under their contract. All architects used to write in their contracts that you couldn't use their design if they were fired, but this was thrown out in court about 70 years ago, and marked the end of the old school profession.
Needless to say, architecture is a high stakes profession at times. Sometimes billions of dollars exchange hands in complicated deals that equal/exceed anything that typically happens in the software profession, involving an owner, architect, contractor, local government, state government, federal government, banks, lenders, shareholders, consultants, tenants, utility companies, suppliers and manufacturers and so on and so forth. All of this must be accomplished with very low failure tolerance, any one of these issues can stop a project dead in its tracks. Take the New World Trade Center project for example, it must be a nighmare to organize that based on the infrastructure alone. The only reason this comes together at all is because everyone has an implicit and explicit understanding what they are supposed to do and they get paid. I think the main problem with software is that there isn't a long tradition of making software. People don't know what is practical or traditional, so they think up and imagine all kinds of ways to give themselves leverage in confusing ways. This creates a minefield of problems specifically intended to bring ruin to another party and make vast amounts of money for very little work. I would wager there are more lawsuits in the building industry, but the overall risk level is lower because those risks are insured for one, and two, people know what to expect and performance and benefit can easily be measured (did that wall fall down, does that roof leak, is there mold in the ductwork, was I paid what I was worth, etc.) and we have 10,000 years of building experience to rely on. Software has about 50 years of relevant history.
In software, who owns what isn't easily established, it isn't a standard practice, no one knows what anything means or what it is truly worth. What is a graphical tree interface worth, I have no idea? Is it worth $1 billion or $1.99, who knows? Compare that to architecture, where even if there is no contract signed, typical business practices are so strong that a contract is always implied and everyone is always held to known standards.
I wonder what kind of gaming they could do with this kind of thing. You could store and entire world on a disk.
It seems like a decent value to me considering what it is for. You can drive around in a truck along a pipeline and have a wireless access point at each pump station which will indicate its status. You can be at a chemical plant and wirelessly place monitoring equipment. If you are on a large construction site or mining operation a central computer will know when your truck, excavation equipment or hauler will need more fuel because you can broadcast that data. This has obvious implications for ports, distribution centers and manufacturing. This is a low cost, off the shelf industrial utility that can connect to any network, it is not designed for handling large data streams because that would make it expensive, but small streams with specific data make it cheap, $90 for a ten pack seems cheap. Combine this with GPS and RFID and you have any number of civilian and military applications. Check out this link.
My favorite theoretical use would be a monitoring device. Hook it up in a car with GPS and wire it for sound and a camera and you can set up a web page to watch it all from the other side of the world if you want, and if it is wired into the cars computer you would know how fast he was going, whether or not he needed an oil change and what radio station he was listening to.
I don't know, 9600 baud? I remember those days, I don't want to go back.
We could end up starting WWIII. I saw war games, I know what a WOPR can do. These modems can cause global thermonuclear war.
On the flip side you could go on vacation without your boss calling you on your cell phone to ask stupid questions.
Nothing is better than Log.
Log log, log LOG, its big, its heavy its wood.
Log log, log LOG, its better than bad its good.
True, but people don't have a right to tresspass.
I think it is more correct to compare this person to someone peeking through your window to see what kind of books you have on your bookshelve
Sorry bub, but that is against the law in addition to being socially unacceptable. It is one thing to look into a storefront, another entirely to creep onto my property and peek in my bedroom to see my what kind of pr0n is on my bookcase. If I happen to lounge in the living room with my lady friend who is dressed like an angel in lace and wearing a Richard Nixon mask and has me chained to a post, naked, while she whips my ass and tells me what a bad Democrat I have been, I don't think some random dude has the right to see that, I don't care if he was curious about my reading habits. If people do that to me, I am inclined to pull out my shotgun and tell them to get the hell off of my land. In some states I am fully empowered to pull the trigger, and will be roundly congratulated if the person shot is a freak, a wierdo or a deviant. Its self defense. Not even the FBI is empowered to sneak and peek without a warrant. That kind of communist thinking doesn't belong in the USA.
Anywhere private information is kept is off limits by social convention first, and by the law second. If we can't have privacy, we can't have freedom.
A computer is personal property. You do not have a right to tresspass on personal property. If you both tresspass and cause damage, you are liable for both infractions. This isn't complicated.
Remember, when it comes to kiddies, and script kiddies, it takes a village!
A good prosecutor can convict anyone, don't screw with the cops, if they really want you to burn, you will burn. And as you may know, the prison version of IANAL is simply ANAL. This is why most people plead out 90% of the time.
The cop will wait until the kid comes across an unlocked door, rummages through the car, and takes something. Then the cop will arrest him
That depends, if the cop just wants to scare the kid straight, he will go up to him, explain that if he catches him messing around he will kick his ass and send him to jail and that he knows his name and where he lives. Hopefully the kid will get the message, a crime will not be committed and the kid will no become a criminal.
"print the following to their printer"
Uhh, aren't you providing evidence that you just did an illegal act if you use their printer.
SCO expects to announce 6-figure revenue from its SCOSource division
The legal fees are $5 million. I guess we wont let little facts like math get in the way of their business plan.
The annoying thing is how mainstream press translates this into - "Linux allegedly violating Unix copyrights"
And now the mainstream press will read that the copyright allegations fell on their ass, were beaten up by United Auto Workers from Detroit, were bound and shackled with German precision, locked in the trunk of a Hemi powered mini van and dumped in a canal. They got ass whooped and if there is one thing Americans hate, it is pathetic losers. Down they go.
M$ is a dominant player in a large, industry among other large industries, in a large country among other large countries in a world filled with industries large and small. M$ has a decent amount of power, but they don't have much influence outside of technology. They aren't even 1% of our economy. If the US government woke up tommorrow and decided to crush the M$ monopoly by passing laws and making things difficult, M$ would melt. They are big, but they aren't that garganuanly huge enough to span the entire country, only Wal-Mart is that big.
You are saying that it is less profitable to sell 10 low bandwidth users a service at $30 than one high bandwidth user at $210, even if the bandwidth usage is the same? That doesn't work by my math. I think you are backwards.
From a business perspective it is better to squeeze a higher overall fee from the same equipment and inf5rastructure. That is why it makes business sense for the phone companies to screw the high bandwidth users over and give low bandwidth users the options of a wide pipe when they need it. The high bandwidth users always have their pipe closer to being maxed out, if you give them a bigger pipe they will use more bandwidth. The low bandwidth user will max out their bandwidth for a much shorter duration (like when they download a movie trailer or i-tunes purchased music). When you add up average bandwidth usage over time, the average low usage consumer doesn't consume nearly as much, maybe a tenth or even less when compared to band width hogs. This way, the company can give out extremely high bandwidth connections for cheap, mostly because the consumer will never fully use it, but the consumer still has the comfort and convenience of a high bandwidth connection.
This doesn't really compare to airline business model, it is more like the insurance business, where most of the time it isn't needed but when it is needed it is needed in a big way. That model depends on it not being used. The more it is utilized, the higher the cost.
The have about $61mil. But they are hemhorraging cash, they have about $4 per share in cash and are losing $1 a share per quarter. I give them a year before their back is to the wall and someone has to bail them out (M$). 54% of their available stock is being shorted right now if that gives you any indication of what people think, that is approaching the level of a Worldcom or Enron as they tanked. yahoo finance
Video on demand is a legit use.
If phone companies bring in fiber, they will be able to offer TV as well. They will have the bandwidth to do it, right now they don't.
I am not sure that is true. Anyone who is going to pay $210/month is going to use their bandwidth is going to be a heavy user, probably maxing out a lot of the time and at peak usage times for the telecom. $30 people on the other hand has aunt susie who only downloads movie trailers a couple times a month, maybe buys a few songs from i-tunes. Those are the people you want, the people who have brief but intense need for bandwidth, they are cheap to keep. The bandwidth hogs are the expensive ones.
The 10 people who probably did not sign up in your scenario, at $30 a month would equal $300, the cost to support them may be roughly equal to your single $210 heavy use person because they use very little bandwidth, they don't host web pages, they don't use p2p. In my mind that is an extra $90/month in pure profit. Fiber is potentially a competitive advantage that the phone company can install at any time to get an edge over cable because it can do everything cable does only better.
I agree Michael Dudikoff was a bad choice, it should have been Elijah Woods and McCauly calkin as the hackers.