Just need to have a speed to keep you in sunlight all the time, which is about 1100mph at the equator in flight, less if you go north/south or fly lower to the ground.
Don't forget its zero MPH for certain times of the year around the poles, and you can glide airplanes.
Lets assume a healthy, perhaps overoptimistic 10:1 glide ratio. And they get up to a rather optimistic 53k feet aka 10 miles over a roughly sea level surface. So, they can glide 100 miles. Lets say it handles like an alaskan bush plane and stalls at 33 MPH. That means 3 hours of glide time, assuming no thermals (at least shortly after sundown) or ridge lift.
I suppose a big enough solar panel might generate measurable power off moonshine. The reflected light, I mean.
Whats so special about the fact that the US is more vulnerable?
All our IT (plus or minus rounding errors) is outsourced to our global competitors, most of whom are beyond the reach of our legal system. In the short term they benefit by keeping us running. In the long run they're better off sinking us. Wonder what'll happen?
See the White house report on Katrina, appendix B, What Went Right. Ham radio is prominent.
And then there's Haiti where it was pretty much irrelevant, other than a van load of hams trying to help was attacked and someone was killed so they said F-it and went home.
There's also two totally separate segments of ham radio emcomm. There's the very public "volunteer IT dept for govt departments" which is widely discussed and consists of memorandum of understandings, orange safety vests, ID cards, paramilitary organization, procedures, insiders vs outsiders political intrigue, endless certification, "who gets to be the boss" and holds no interest whatsoever for me. Despite the stated goals, most of the actual activity is oriented around providing free IT service to public events, races and carnivals and such, as opposed to actual emcomm events. Nothing wrong with volunteering, but its not real emcomm.
Then there's "helping yourself and the public" which is an entirely separate way of doing things, which I am interested in, but is not widely discussed. We the unprepared, are called upon to do so much, with so little...
Based on a quarter century of observation, segment #1 takes most of the credit for the hard work of segment #2, yet segment #1 generally ostracizes/ignores/looks down on segment #2 whenever possible.
So, who actually dominates, intelligent people, or libertarians?
The answer is pretty simple. The playing field / ground rules / FCC regulations are vaguely libertarian-ish as I discussed. However, the politics of the folks on that playing field vary all over the map.
Very similar to how the "US Fascist System" sets the rules, such as govt reps owned by corporations, privatize the profits while socializing the losses, all policy decisions oriented toward the destruction of the middle class, etc. But inside the US system, individuals have a pretty broad spectrum of political views.
I was not trying to imply that everyone in ham radio is a Rand-ite. The spectrum on the air vaguely matches the spectrum on the ground. American hams mostly have politics like most Americans. The Cuban hams mostly match up with Cuban politics. The Japanese, well, you get the idea.
So, libertarian types will resonate (bad pun) with the existing FCC rules and be quite happy. The fascist, authoritarian types will generally try to change the rules to remove freedoms, add licensing requirements, generally "mess with people". Its an inherently more libertarian playing field, than a homeowners association, a school board, or a local police and fire commission.
So that's what I'm getting at. If you desperately want to use government power to force your neighbors to decorate their homes to fit your personal tastes, or like to forcibly control what the local teachers are allowed to say about various topics, or basically just like to be a bully, you'll probably not like the politics of the laws and regulations for ham radio. Oh you can still have plenty of fun, and its very interesting, but you won't like the "climate".
Not the ones I've seen. (Hospital and nuke reactor backup.)
Ever see them try to spin up a 1 MW class diesel locomotive engine in winter? Its not pretty in the best of conditions, even worse if everyone's stressed out. There's a reason they don't shut off diesel loco engines in the winter. And even in TX it does get cold on occasion.
I was told in a tour that the nuke backup engines go full power in much less than 10s, but, they keep the coolant and engine block heated to operating temp 24x7 with electrical heaters, they have bizarre oil systems that are kept pumping 24x7 yet somehow don't hydrolock the pistons, they have onsite 24x7 maintenance crews, and still they occasionally break so they need multiple ones for true redundancy. I was told the only real delay in starting is something about needing to stabilize the airflow in the intake and exhaust before throwing a huge load on, something about air tanks, pneumatic starters. and how they vent. Obviously this was more than a decade ago, after 9/11 they absolutely JUMPED at the chance to get rid of tours. I was told that they have the cleanest engine oil in the state, actually cleaner than fresh in the can, because they pump it continuously thru filters 24x7.
A battery is a lot simpler, if it will switch over at all, it'll do so in a couple milliseconds, and there's not much maintenance possible, so not much to schedule and pay for.
2) So much effort in designing it to be "easy" and "clear", that its impossible to use for applications it wasn't designed for. The stuff they simplified is too simple, the tough-stuff resembles line noise.
3) Not used much outside of MIS departments.
4) Trade schools teach it, as a trade. Folks getting an "education" learn something else, or at best take a class in it to widen their horizons. Nuff said.
5) Every time someone points out no one uses it anymore, the graybeards snap their suspenders and make comments about how much business is done using it by listing companies that they haven't noticed went out of business 5 years ago, which inevitably drifts into reminisce about how it ruled the world back when dinos roamed the earth etc.
6) Dad probably used it at work, and you know how teenagers love to be a rebel.
7) Well, everybody uses it for database driven apps, don't we?
8) Dead/moribund in the open source world, at least compared to C.
40 years ago there was a somewhat well known magazine series involving building radio gear into food cans. Much like the altoids tin craze about a decade ago.
Most famously a crystal controlled transmitter built into a tuna can. Looks a heck of a lot like this:
There was a VFO for that transmitter (or perhaps another) with a nice VFO in, you guessed it, a spam can, with a slider arm out the top to control frequency. Or some other "vaguely rectangular meat product in a can".
Its like a really cool science experiment, maybe the worlds coolest EE lab ever, and co-incidentally you end up talking to people with the same interest. Imagine if magically doing geology rock collecting meant you'd inherently meet other people into geology (rather than just by accident or whatever). The average IQ of ham radio must be like 130, you don't meet boring people (mostly).
Also has a pretty libertarian bent. Here are some slivers of bandwidth of various levels of usefulness. Do whatever the heck you want, with very few limitations. Most of the limitations amount to not replicating the job of another radio service, like, say, public broadcasting. Some obvious safety type limitations. Some obvious "play nice with others" requirements. Other than that, have fun.
And then there are competitive contesters. Just how far can you talk to folks? And how many? Why? Same reason as climbing Mt Everest, just because you can.
Building stuff is quite a kick. I don't mean bolting together premade assemblies like "building" a computer, but I mean designing and soldering stuff together and then talking to people using it. Don't have to, but its fun.
There's the restoration crowd, that takes old/obsolete equipment, tune it up, use it. Like the car restoration folks. Interesting way to learn about history. And learning about history means you learn about the present.
The emergency service guys are a little odd. 50 years ago the hams had better equipment than the cops. Now a days, other way around. No point anymore. Lots of pompous, lots of small group politics. But its a pretty libertarian hobby, folks just stay out of each others way, mostly anyway.
Finally there's doing crazy stuff. I don't care if its obsolete, if you think AM NTSC TV transmitters are cool, you can use them if you want. Want to do something technologically odd for the sake of doing it? Fine.
Morse was useful when it was the only, or one of about two, communications modes.
When it was just morse or AM voice, it made sense to test morse, since all radio ops, including maritime distress, used morse. Since no one other than hams uses morse anymore, theres no interoperability, and its no longer the main mode of ham radio.
You want learning, challenge, accomplishment, build an AM NTSC TV transmitter and properly tune it, build a semi-cutting edge microwave transverter, use some exotic sound card digital mode to communicate at -20 dB SNR, try ALE, enter some contests, I've done all that.
You realize that many of the innovations you just named happened after telecommunications deregulation, right?
Yet, still comparatively "hyper regulated" compared to a non-net neutrality ISP world, whos only accomplishment has been increasing the numbers in the "imaginary speed" marketing material... My point still stands.
Well, lets just be realistic here. If you have a tough skin, and you can document that the customer was abusive thus explaining your long call time, even better if you get to record their foul language, and you're paid by the hour, why not play solitaire on the computer while customer rants? If you boot him, you might get someone whom will make you actually work.
The other thing is you'd be amazed what low level folks can do to someone whom is rude to them. There is probably a very simple practical reason why someone whom is a jerk seems to have such unusually bad luck. God only knows what people like that are eating after they give their waiter or deli clerk a rough time. A receptionist can really make your life a living hell, if she wants, especially if she learns you have an important time commitment real soon. "Sir, your paperwork/account seems to have been lost. Could you fill that out again in quadruplicate and we'll start over."
The reason type "A" (ahole) folks die young isn't some mysterious medical thing, its folks F-ing with them to get them to blow a gasket. I've never personally been involved, but I've heard of riled up customers dying while ranting. Probably just urban legend.
I don't know if you've ever worked a "trouble ticket" job, but most places I've been, the front line folks find it absolutely hilarious to document in the ticket exactly what abusive customers say, and then cut and paste and email to approx half the world for the LOLs. People frothing at the mouth are generally pretty funny, in or out of context, once their brain stops working and they start ranting.
The fact that they don't call the cops every time, does not mean the laws don't exist...
Instead of Comcast being able to write off a lot of the cost of being an ISP because it improves the cable TV business, the new ISP unit will have to stand on its own. That is going to mean some very large rate increases.
I will not speak for my current employer, whom is not Comcast, but you're making the huge assumption that cablemodems are unprofitable, or at least less profitable than video service. You might be very surprised by the actual numbers. People have been carefully conditioned to cough up a rather constant sum of money, while the cost of the machinery and bandwidth has collapsed, and the cost of making a service available to an area, per subscriber, shrinks as the number and percentage of subscribers increases. In many areas, cablemodems are more popular than domestic pets.
The biggest problem is paying for network maintenance. Out of 700 MHz of bandwidth, should cablemodems cough up about 12 MHz/700 MHz about 2% of the network maintenance costs, or some sub count number in the ratio of settop boxes vs cablemodems or...
Now your argument MIGHT work for marketing to sneak thru a rate increase, hey pure profit can't leave that on the table. Sounds like you believe that argument, others probably do too.
Regardless, the point still stands. Have you seen a 3-4x improvement in the product you receive from your POTS provider?
Actually, yes, given that around 25 years ago I had a pulse rotary phone with no 3-way calling, no call waiting, no E911, no caller id, long distance calls cost about a "beer per minute"...
I think everyone can agree that the subject in question (all information being treated equally) is a very big part of Net Neutrality.
Totally wrong.
Information can be encrypted so no one can figure out what it is, its just a matter of convenience that we don't.
The key to net neutrality is treating the sources and destinations equally.
For example, no accepting bribes from one bookseller to ruin the connections with a competing bookseller. Or ruin connections to an independent voip provider so as to sell your own voip product. Or ruin connections to the demo-pulicans website the night before elections.
Furthermore, I am pretty sure you can and do have every right to walk into Comcast's local office and say, "Fuck you and your non-neuatral internet," right to their face.
Actually, no. Disturbing the peace, that'll probably be a municipal ticket, perhaps a misdemeanor if you're really obnoxious.
Don't assume regulation involves a loss. Some regulations exist solely to make a profit. (speed traps, war on some drugs, probably others). Golly Gee comcast, that'll be $1M for blocking voicepulse.com's VOIP service, head on down to city hall and get in line with the property tax payers at the cashiers office...
The big problem with getting the locals to do the net neutrality thing, is in the USA, corporations and govt have merged at all levels. At the local level, why would some dumpy local bookstore want people to be able to access amazon.com? Why would any of the dumpy local antique shops want people to be able to access ebay.com? Why would the local fishwrap (newspaper) want people to be able to access news.google.com? I'm struggling to think of a local business that would benefit from allowing the unwashed masses to access their competitors over the internet...
It says a lot about the "modern IT world" that hot-backup and high reliability is considered bizarre and unusual enough to require scare quotes around "disaster recovery", and they have to explain the basic concept of not having a single point of failure to their readers.
A couple decades ago my first real IT job was at a mainframe shop that had two machines, either of which could quite easily handle the load, for obvious reasons. You don't just "shut off" roughly 5% of the US stock market transactions because a maintenance dude wants to replace an air filter or whatever.
I'm quite sure Hercules could handily have saved them untold millions on hardware and maint contracts. Of course IBM would have freaked...
So you think 20 years is a reasonable time frame for software patents? The ZX Spectrum was still manufactured 20 years ago.
Oh, that's not even the worst part.
As I see it, the worst part is the trade rags were flaunting the PR news releases for silicon that implemented the marketing goals listed in patent 7254698 back in 1999.
But the website I checked showed 7254698 wasn't issued until August 7 2007.
Using your example, it would be like not issuing the ZX Spectrum patent until say, 2010, attaching the emulator community, then waiting another 20 years until it expires.
That surprises me, who wouldn't like to invest time and money to create something, then have to turn around and compete against someone who basically just copies it and gives it away?
No time and money was invested in creating at least one of the patents. For example, look at one of the "infringed" patents, US Patent 7254698. The claims are merely a "shopping list" or "marketing glossy" of the peculiar feature of an ALU, which happens to be installed in a particular mainframe, that the Hercules guys would like to emulate:
Does multiply/add and multiply/subtract
Five deep pipeline, one result per cycle
binary or hex floating point format
Works on two different architecture formats.
It would take about a minute to make a spreadsheet in Excel that theoretically infringes on that patent, and probably an hour or so to make a perfect replica. Really all you need to do is implement mX+b=y with a five deep stack/array, given some peculiar input and output formats.
Now IBM will sell you a circuit board circa 2001-ish that will do this. They spent all their effort making an expensive machine that implements these simple math ideas in silicon. No one is stealing their physical hardware, or blueprints, or VHDL/Verilog, etc etc.
The emulator merely does the same calculations in C, and its free.
It boils down to IBM saying "no emulating our exact instruction set"
One ethical problem with patents like 7254698, aside from obvious ones like trying to patent basic linear algebra equations, is the supporting docs are all from 1999 to 2001 ish era. But its doing the submarine thing in that it was not issued until August 7 2007, "around a decade" after they were shipping silicon, more or less, sort of. And it won't expire until around 2023 which in the computer field is an absolute eternity.
I will give IBM credit, that unlike a patent troll, they actually built silicon to do something, not just patented an idea. But not much credit.
I have not looked into all hundred+ patents but they're probably all very similar to this one, but for other parts of the CPU instruction set.
IHBD might be used a number of ways, most that involve incorporating user data that "goes with" published content on the same bit of media, so that the user content "follows" the published content.
but releasing them wouldn't really matter to the companies that keep them
Carrot or stick? Stick seems a miserable failure. Lets try carrot.
Allow them to sell your records for a minimum high fixed cost. You know they trade them for free right now. High enough that the market is pretty thin indeed. Lets say $100K and you are required to get a cash kickback of $X per sale. If your info is publicized, their balance sheet is ruined since no one would buy from them and you can sue them for your kickback. They'll just discount the cost off their balance sheet onto some kind of NPV calculation, but at least its a start.
Sometimes things are overbuilt for future use. For example in my area a large building at the local CC was designed and built for a "printing industry center of excellence". Crashed and burned, now they have general ed classes in the empty rooms.
The womens bathrooms will get more use when VW moves out and nursing holds some classes in the empty rooms. Or the handicapped folks training to become accountants, or whatever.
I find it highly unlikely you'll pay $130/sq for a permit alone. Maybe total project cost from say go until first class is held.
Slashdot Mirror
Just need to have a speed to keep you in sunlight all the time, which is about 1100mph at the equator in flight, less if you go north/south or fly lower to the ground.
Don't forget its zero MPH for certain times of the year around the poles, and you can glide airplanes.
Lets assume a healthy, perhaps overoptimistic 10:1 glide ratio. And they get up to a rather optimistic 53k feet aka 10 miles over a roughly sea level surface. So, they can glide 100 miles. Lets say it handles like an alaskan bush plane and stalls at 33 MPH. That means 3 hours of glide time, assuming no thermals (at least shortly after sundown) or ridge lift.
I suppose a big enough solar panel might generate measurable power off moonshine. The reflected light, I mean.
Whats so special about the fact that the US is more vulnerable?
All our IT (plus or minus rounding errors) is outsourced to our global competitors, most of whom are beyond the reach of our legal system. In the short term they benefit by keeping us running. In the long run they're better off sinking us. Wonder what'll happen?
If you're not a R/C car driver. It takes a few hours to make a good R/C car driver.
Some never figure out the steering reversal when going toward vs away from you.
Same deal with R/C aircraft, R/C boats. R/C robots are just unusual looking R/C cars, so same deal there.
But once you learn how to drive R/C, its not "difficult"
See the White house report on Katrina, appendix B, What Went Right. Ham radio is prominent.
And then there's Haiti where it was pretty much irrelevant, other than a van load of hams trying to help was attacked and someone was killed so they said F-it and went home.
There's also two totally separate segments of ham radio emcomm. There's the very public "volunteer IT dept for govt departments" which is widely discussed and consists of memorandum of understandings, orange safety vests, ID cards, paramilitary organization, procedures, insiders vs outsiders political intrigue, endless certification, "who gets to be the boss" and holds no interest whatsoever for me. Despite the stated goals, most of the actual activity is oriented around providing free IT service to public events, races and carnivals and such, as opposed to actual emcomm events. Nothing wrong with volunteering, but its not real emcomm.
Then there's "helping yourself and the public" which is an entirely separate way of doing things, which I am interested in, but is not widely discussed. We the unprepared, are called upon to do so much, with so little ...
Based on a quarter century of observation, segment #1 takes most of the credit for the hard work of segment #2, yet segment #1 generally ostracizes/ignores/looks down on segment #2 whenever possible.
So, who actually dominates, intelligent people, or libertarians?
The answer is pretty simple. The playing field / ground rules / FCC regulations are vaguely libertarian-ish as I discussed. However, the politics of the folks on that playing field vary all over the map.
Very similar to how the "US Fascist System" sets the rules, such as govt reps owned by corporations, privatize the profits while socializing the losses, all policy decisions oriented toward the destruction of the middle class, etc. But inside the US system, individuals have a pretty broad spectrum of political views.
I was not trying to imply that everyone in ham radio is a Rand-ite. The spectrum on the air vaguely matches the spectrum on the ground. American hams mostly have politics like most Americans. The Cuban hams mostly match up with Cuban politics. The Japanese, well, you get the idea.
So, libertarian types will resonate (bad pun) with the existing FCC rules and be quite happy. The fascist, authoritarian types will generally try to change the rules to remove freedoms, add licensing requirements, generally "mess with people". Its an inherently more libertarian playing field, than a homeowners association, a school board, or a local police and fire commission.
So that's what I'm getting at. If you desperately want to use government power to force your neighbors to decorate their homes to fit your personal tastes, or like to forcibly control what the local teachers are allowed to say about various topics, or basically just like to be a bully, you'll probably not like the politics of the laws and regulations for ham radio. Oh you can still have plenty of fun, and its very interesting, but you won't like the "climate".
I bet that the emulator doesn't have a pipeline.
Yeah, but like I said, the patent claims cover the ABI or marketing specs, not how it was done.
So, a faithful emulator will take 5 cycles from input to output, and because the patent says it should take 5 cycles, it is therefore infringing.
Now if the emulator took 1 emulated cycle, it would not infringe, but then again code compiled assuming it takes 5 cycles would not work right.
So, it can either be a cruddy emulator, or it can infringe.
I haven't investigated this peculiar feature, but I have used Hercules, and I would not be surprised, if it did indeed emulate a 5-deep pipeline.
Not the ones I've seen. (Hospital and nuke reactor backup.)
Ever see them try to spin up a 1 MW class diesel locomotive engine in winter? Its not pretty in the best of conditions, even worse if everyone's stressed out. There's a reason they don't shut off diesel loco engines in the winter. And even in TX it does get cold on occasion.
I was told in a tour that the nuke backup engines go full power in much less than 10s, but, they keep the coolant and engine block heated to operating temp 24x7 with electrical heaters, they have bizarre oil systems that are kept pumping 24x7 yet somehow don't hydrolock the pistons, they have onsite 24x7 maintenance crews, and still they occasionally break so they need multiple ones for true redundancy. I was told the only real delay in starting is something about needing to stabilize the airflow in the intake and exhaust before throwing a huge load on, something about air tanks, pneumatic starters. and how they vent. Obviously this was more than a decade ago, after 9/11 they absolutely JUMPED at the chance to get rid of tours. I was told that they have the cleanest engine oil in the state, actually cleaner than fresh in the can, because they pump it continuously thru filters 24x7.
A battery is a lot simpler, if it will switch over at all, it'll do so in a couple milliseconds, and there's not much maintenance possible, so not much to schedule and pay for.
C is the new COBOL.
Nahh. Java is the new COBOL.
Think about it:
1) Hyper-verbose.
2) So much effort in designing it to be "easy" and "clear", that its impossible to use for applications it wasn't designed for. The stuff they simplified is too simple, the tough-stuff resembles line noise.
3) Not used much outside of MIS departments.
4) Trade schools teach it, as a trade. Folks getting an "education" learn something else, or at best take a class in it to widen their horizons. Nuff said.
5) Every time someone points out no one uses it anymore, the graybeards snap their suspenders and make comments about how much business is done using it by listing companies that they haven't noticed went out of business 5 years ago, which inevitably drifts into reminisce about how it ruled the world back when dinos roamed the earth etc.
6) Dad probably used it at work, and you know how teenagers love to be a rebel.
7) Well, everybody uses it for database driven apps, don't we?
8) Dead/moribund in the open source world, at least compared to C.
Where's the catch?
No business related communications, except for very very few exceptions?
40 years ago there was a somewhat well known magazine series involving building radio gear into food cans. Much like the altoids tin craze about a decade ago.
Most famously a crystal controlled transmitter built into a tuna can. Looks a heck of a lot like this:
http://www.amqrp.org/kits/tt2/index.html
There was a VFO for that transmitter (or perhaps another) with a nice VFO in, you guessed it, a spam can, with a slider arm out the top to control frequency. Or some other "vaguely rectangular meat product in a can".
Its like a really cool science experiment, maybe the worlds coolest EE lab ever, and co-incidentally you end up talking to people with the same interest. Imagine if magically doing geology rock collecting meant you'd inherently meet other people into geology (rather than just by accident or whatever). The average IQ of ham radio must be like 130, you don't meet boring people (mostly).
Also has a pretty libertarian bent. Here are some slivers of bandwidth of various levels of usefulness. Do whatever the heck you want, with very few limitations. Most of the limitations amount to not replicating the job of another radio service, like, say, public broadcasting. Some obvious safety type limitations. Some obvious "play nice with others" requirements. Other than that, have fun.
And then there are competitive contesters. Just how far can you talk to folks? And how many? Why? Same reason as climbing Mt Everest, just because you can.
Building stuff is quite a kick. I don't mean bolting together premade assemblies like "building" a computer, but I mean designing and soldering stuff together and then talking to people using it. Don't have to, but its fun.
There's the restoration crowd, that takes old/obsolete equipment, tune it up, use it. Like the car restoration folks. Interesting way to learn about history. And learning about history means you learn about the present.
The emergency service guys are a little odd. 50 years ago the hams had better equipment than the cops. Now a days, other way around. No point anymore. Lots of pompous, lots of small group politics. But its a pretty libertarian hobby, folks just stay out of each others way, mostly anyway.
Finally there's doing crazy stuff. I don't care if its obsolete, if you think AM NTSC TV transmitters are cool, you can use them if you want. Want to do something technologically odd for the sake of doing it? Fine.
Morse was useful when it was the only, or one of about two, communications modes.
When it was just morse or AM voice, it made sense to test morse, since all radio ops, including maritime distress, used morse. Since no one other than hams uses morse anymore, theres no interoperability, and its no longer the main mode of ham radio.
You want learning, challenge, accomplishment, build an AM NTSC TV transmitter and properly tune it, build a semi-cutting edge microwave transverter, use some exotic sound card digital mode to communicate at -20 dB SNR, try ALE, enter some contests, I've done all that.
You realize that many of the innovations you just named happened after telecommunications deregulation, right?
Yet, still comparatively "hyper regulated" compared to a non-net neutrality ISP world, whos only accomplishment has been increasing the numbers in the "imaginary speed" marketing material... My point still stands.
Well, lets just be realistic here. If you have a tough skin, and you can document that the customer was abusive thus explaining your long call time, even better if you get to record their foul language, and you're paid by the hour, why not play solitaire on the computer while customer rants? If you boot him, you might get someone whom will make you actually work.
The other thing is you'd be amazed what low level folks can do to someone whom is rude to them. There is probably a very simple practical reason why someone whom is a jerk seems to have such unusually bad luck. God only knows what people like that are eating after they give their waiter or deli clerk a rough time. A receptionist can really make your life a living hell, if she wants, especially if she learns you have an important time commitment real soon. "Sir, your paperwork/account seems to have been lost. Could you fill that out again in quadruplicate and we'll start over."
The reason type "A" (ahole) folks die young isn't some mysterious medical thing, its folks F-ing with them to get them to blow a gasket. I've never personally been involved, but I've heard of riled up customers dying while ranting. Probably just urban legend.
I don't know if you've ever worked a "trouble ticket" job, but most places I've been, the front line folks find it absolutely hilarious to document in the ticket exactly what abusive customers say, and then cut and paste and email to approx half the world for the LOLs. People frothing at the mouth are generally pretty funny, in or out of context, once their brain stops working and they start ranting.
The fact that they don't call the cops every time, does not mean the laws don't exist...
Instead of Comcast being able to write off a lot of the cost of being an ISP because it improves the cable TV business, the new ISP unit will have to stand on its own. That is going to mean some very large rate increases.
I will not speak for my current employer, whom is not Comcast, but you're making the huge assumption that cablemodems are unprofitable, or at least less profitable than video service. You might be very surprised by the actual numbers. People have been carefully conditioned to cough up a rather constant sum of money, while the cost of the machinery and bandwidth has collapsed, and the cost of making a service available to an area, per subscriber, shrinks as the number and percentage of subscribers increases. In many areas, cablemodems are more popular than domestic pets.
The biggest problem is paying for network maintenance. Out of 700 MHz of bandwidth, should cablemodems cough up about 12 MHz/700 MHz about 2% of the network maintenance costs, or some sub count number in the ratio of settop boxes vs cablemodems or ...
Now your argument MIGHT work for marketing to sneak thru a rate increase, hey pure profit can't leave that on the table. Sounds like you believe that argument, others probably do too.
Regardless, the point still stands. Have you seen a 3-4x improvement in the product you receive from your POTS provider?
Actually, yes, given that around 25 years ago I had a pulse rotary phone with no 3-way calling, no call waiting, no E911, no caller id, long distance calls cost about a "beer per minute"...
I think everyone can agree that the subject in question (all information being treated equally) is a very big part of Net Neutrality.
Totally wrong.
Information can be encrypted so no one can figure out what it is, its just a matter of convenience that we don't.
The key to net neutrality is treating the sources and destinations equally.
For example, no accepting bribes from one bookseller to ruin the connections with a competing bookseller. Or ruin connections to an independent voip provider so as to sell your own voip product. Or ruin connections to the demo-pulicans website the night before elections.
Furthermore, I am pretty sure you can and do have every right to walk into Comcast's local office and say, "Fuck you and your non-neuatral internet," right to their face.
Actually, no. Disturbing the peace, that'll probably be a municipal ticket, perhaps a misdemeanor if you're really obnoxious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disturbing_the_peace_(crime)
Spend more money on regulating Comcast
Don't assume regulation involves a loss. Some regulations exist solely to make a profit. (speed traps, war on some drugs, probably others). Golly Gee comcast, that'll be $1M for blocking voicepulse.com's VOIP service, head on down to city hall and get in line with the property tax payers at the cashiers office...
The big problem with getting the locals to do the net neutrality thing, is in the USA, corporations and govt have merged at all levels. At the local level, why would some dumpy local bookstore want people to be able to access amazon.com? Why would any of the dumpy local antique shops want people to be able to access ebay.com? Why would the local fishwrap (newspaper) want people to be able to access news.google.com? I'm struggling to think of a local business that would benefit from allowing the unwashed masses to access their competitors over the internet...
It says a lot about the "modern IT world" that hot-backup and high reliability is considered bizarre and unusual enough to require scare quotes around "disaster recovery", and they have to explain the basic concept of not having a single point of failure to their readers.
A couple decades ago my first real IT job was at a mainframe shop that had two machines, either of which could quite easily handle the load, for obvious reasons. You don't just "shut off" roughly 5% of the US stock market transactions because a maintenance dude wants to replace an air filter or whatever.
I'm quite sure Hercules could handily have saved them untold millions on hardware and maint contracts. Of course IBM would have freaked...
So you think 20 years is a reasonable time frame for software patents? The ZX Spectrum was still manufactured 20 years ago.
Oh, that's not even the worst part.
As I see it, the worst part is the trade rags were flaunting the PR news releases for silicon that implemented the marketing goals listed in patent 7254698 back in 1999.
But the website I checked showed 7254698 wasn't issued until August 7 2007.
Using your example, it would be like not issuing the ZX Spectrum patent until say, 2010, attaching the emulator community, then waiting another 20 years until it expires.
That surprises me, who wouldn't like to invest time and money to create something, then have to turn around and compete against someone who basically just copies it and gives it away?
No time and money was invested in creating at least one of the patents. For example, look at one of the "infringed" patents, US Patent 7254698. The claims are merely a "shopping list" or "marketing glossy" of the peculiar feature of an ALU, which happens to be installed in a particular mainframe, that the Hercules guys would like to emulate:
Does multiply/add and multiply/subtract
Five deep pipeline, one result per cycle
binary or hex floating point format
Works on two different architecture formats.
It would take about a minute to make a spreadsheet in Excel that theoretically infringes on that patent, and probably an hour or so to make a perfect replica. Really all you need to do is implement mX+b=y with a five deep stack/array, given some peculiar input and output formats.
Now IBM will sell you a circuit board circa 2001-ish that will do this. They spent all their effort making an expensive machine that implements these simple math ideas in silicon. No one is stealing their physical hardware, or blueprints, or VHDL/Verilog, etc etc.
The emulator merely does the same calculations in C, and its free.
It boils down to IBM saying "no emulating our exact instruction set"
One ethical problem with patents like 7254698, aside from obvious ones like trying to patent basic linear algebra equations, is the supporting docs are all from 1999 to 2001 ish era. But its doing the submarine thing in that it was not issued until August 7 2007, "around a decade" after they were shipping silicon, more or less, sort of. And it won't expire until around 2023 which in the computer field is an absolute eternity.
I will give IBM credit, that unlike a patent troll, they actually built silicon to do something, not just patented an idea. But not much credit.
I have not looked into all hundred+ patents but they're probably all very similar to this one, but for other parts of the CPU instruction set.
IHBD might be used a number of ways, most that involve incorporating user data that "goes with" published content on the same bit of media, so that the user content "follows" the published content.
Homemade Pr0n, now starring you and ms. whoever?
but releasing them wouldn't really matter to the companies that keep them
Carrot or stick? Stick seems a miserable failure. Lets try carrot.
Allow them to sell your records for a minimum high fixed cost. You know they trade them for free right now. High enough that the market is pretty thin indeed. Lets say $100K and you are required to get a cash kickback of $X per sale. If your info is publicized, their balance sheet is ruined since no one would buy from them and you can sue them for your kickback. They'll just discount the cost off their balance sheet onto some kind of NPV calculation, but at least its a start.
Sometimes things are overbuilt for future use. For example in my area a large building at the local CC was designed and built for a "printing industry center of excellence". Crashed and burned, now they have general ed classes in the empty rooms.
The womens bathrooms will get more use when VW moves out and nursing holds some classes in the empty rooms. Or the handicapped folks training to become accountants, or whatever.
I find it highly unlikely you'll pay $130/sq for a permit alone. Maybe total project cost from say go until first class is held.