EVs are cool, but have limitations in practical use that Hybrids don't.
Limited range: The GOOD EVs I've seen can go about 100 miles per charge.
Recharge time: HOURS...
Recharge locations: Limited.
Size: Small.
I drive 80-100 miles per day for my commute and around town stuff. EVs don't have the range. They may be rated for very close to it, but in bad conditions they don't perform. For example, cold weather kills battery efficiency. I live in Utah, it's cold at least half the year here! I also can't wait hours for a recharge and could only realisticly charge at home. I have too much to do. I'm 6'4" and 350lbs, the small cars like the EV1 just don't cut it. I also need reasonable cargo space when I go shopping and such. A Corolla is about as small as I can go.
On the other hand, the 04 Prius offers me more space than a Corolla (close to the Camry), "recharge" times of about 5 minutes (same as a regular car), the ability to "charge" anywhere I want to (there are gas stations everywhere), and about 40-50 MPG on the highway (most of my driving, calculated milage). Range is 400-500 miles per "charge". And with 295 lb-ft of torque (0-1200 RPM), off the line, it can even feel "sporty" to drive!
EVs can't match that. No current battery comes anywhere near the energy density of gasoline. Add the charge times, and other limitations, and that rules out EVs as nothing more than a curiousity for 90% of people. Sure, you could use a different car for long distance trips and such, but now you're telling people that they need *2* cars to do what *1* could before. That's a hard sell, and one of the many reasons the EV1 didn't sell well and was pulled from the market.
Hybrids aren't perfect, but they are a step up from pure gas and a good stepping stone toward a 100% renewable vehicle. Most importanly, they are here NOW, have a few years and a generation behined them (the 04 is gen2 of Toyota's tech, 2000 IIRC is the first Prius model in the US). What we learn from them can be applied to EVs over time, and thier batteries being mass produced could help drop the production costs to the level where we could use the NiMH or Li-Ion type batteries in an affordable EV. IMO, it's the right way to evolve the tech. Start with something that has noticable benefits, that is practical with existing infrastructure, and that people will pay for today. I see Hybrids as a "proof of concept" that cleaner cars can do all the same things regular cars can, and can use less gas and make less polution in the process. That's a GOOD THING.
I think people would accept a shorter time between refueling. The catch is that is has to be a FAST refuel. I can "gas up" in 5 minutes or less, including the time to get off the freeway and back. Battery powered electrics can't come anywhere near this refuel speed. Even the "fast charger" for my cellphone li-ion takes a couple hours to charge. This is a problem because people *WILL* forget to plug the car in and not be able to drive to work the next day. They will think about this when they are considering thier options. This is a deal-breaker for me, and I'm good at remembering to plug things in.
You also have to consider the road-trip options. People buying a car consider ALL the uses they want to put that car to. Even the once a year type uses. If they want to be able to drive 600 miles to visit the family, a 100 mile range battery powered electric that needs 2 hour recharges doesn't look real practical, does it? When battery powered cars cost more, and do less, people won't buy them. More so if they need ANOTHER car on top of that with an ICE just so they can do everything they need to do.
Refueling is also inconvienent and having to do it more often would make it even more so. This is another downside. IMO, the best short-term option is to combine the best of both worlds with the hybrid cars. The problem is, they are too small for me right now. I'm a big guy, 6'4" 300lbs. I simply don't fit in those small cars. If they ditched the mostly useless rear seat and made one with enough legroom for a tall person while still being able to reach the controls, with a reasonably sized trunk for traveling/shopping, I might think about it. It would be great for my 45 mile commute. I just do the best I can with what I have and get about 35MPG. Not so bad, considering the other option was a 15MPG SUV.;)
You don't get it. What we, the hackers, can do is irrevelant. They don't really care so much about us, they know that can't stop *US* with tech. And they know we represent all of about 1% of the TV-watching public. We simply don't matter to them.
They care about joe-sixpack. This *WILL* stop him and all the other "lusers" because *THEY* don't have the technical skill to hack the TiVo, or build a MythTV box. On top of that, it will be *ILLEGAL* to sell a box (or a card for your MythTV box for that matter) that can ignore the broadcast flag. This will effectively OBLITERATE "fair-use" for Digital/HDTV. PVRs aren't a critical mass yet and users of those boxes simply don't have the lobby power we need to fight this. We *MUST* get the "lusers" involved if we intend to win this battle. And if we don't win, say goodbye to your TiVo come 2006. It won't work anymore and they won't be allowed to sell you one that you will be willing to pay for as it will be crippled with this broadcast flag BS.
Apparently some people don't understand libertarianisim. The author of the article seems to be in that camp.
But if you're a libretarian, maybe you think it ought to be legal to break into homes if you're strong enough to break down the front door or cleaver enough to pick the lock. And of course, it's ok for spammers to forge headers, use deceptive subject lines, impersonate unsuspecting users, intentionally misspell words or make tricky use of whitespace or embed special html tages for no purpose other than to get past filters, all to hock fraudulent scams and questional merchandise.
Call my a pink liberal commie, but I think it ought to be illegal to use such fraudulent, bad-faith tactics. And it's not ok to break into my home, even on the rare occasion when I happen to forget to lock the door!
Nope. Breaking into your home, locked or not, would be an initiation of force against you. Stopping such activity (or at least having laws and police in an attempt to) is a valid use of government to every libertarian I have met. Libertarians also belive government should be able to prevent fraud. I think that the writer of the article simply doesn't understand the things spammers do to get past filters and how they harm the network. IMO, any libertarian, once informed by a techie, would agree that 90% or more of the spam is sent by people that are engaging in fraud or the online-equivilant of lock picking and theft of computer resources. Once they realize this, any libertarian would be forced to conclude that such activities fall under any reasonable deffinition of "initiation of force".
IMO, the best soultion is to include things like deliberately obscuring words, sender identity, addresses, headers, creating/using viruses that create relay networks and other circumvention technologies in the computer crimes legislation on the books as cracking. Not banning "Spam"/UCE per-se, but the fradulant delivery and hijacking of computers and networks that they engage in now.
I don't know why some packet shaper hasn't come along to do this. The idea is simple, probably somewhat complex to actually impliment, but not too hard I would think.
Basicly, everyone has a "priority ranking" in the system based on IP address. Your priority rank is the inverse of your usage averaged over some time period. So if you you use it a lot, your priority is lower down to some threshold. If the pipe is not busy, and you're the only one on, you get all of it regardless of priority. If someone else comes on, they get higher priority than you when they are using the net. This helps evenly distribute bandwidth to many clients, while not letting one big user harm the connection for the light users. But when there aren't that many users, the heaver users get big bandwidth. This way, everyone gets what they want and the heavy users are still happy without caps and worrying about per-meg charges and such. They just get lower speeds durring times when the network is congested. The light users see a blazingly fast connection all the time even if some P2P user has thier P2P app running 24/7.
I have some Mandrake 9.1 discs burned on Imation CD-Rs that would say otherwise. Disc 1 can't even boot anymore. It worked fine when I burned it a couple months ago, but now has errors. I have some MP3 CDs burned on those as well that have similiar problems. I wouldn't trust these things with anything beyond basic use-and-toss right now. The Mandrake discs were stored indoors, the MP3s were in my car. I can kind of understand the ones in the car, it gets hot in there in the summer, but they were never in direct sunlight. I've had cheap green-dye generic CD-Rs last longer in my car.
The ones I've found to be the best that I can buy at the store right now are Verbatum Datalife PLUS. They seem to be able to hold up to some decent abuse. If I could still find them, I would buy Gold discs.. I have a bunch of old discs burned on those from the days of 2x burners that still read perfectly. Many are audio CDs, which lack the extra error correction that data CDs have. I think I paid $8/ea at the time, but not having to worry about them is worth extra $. Not that I would pay that much for anything but the most important data. I think I'm going to buy some Mitsui Gold discs and see how those stand up to abuse.
Rather than changing more or limiting the bandwidth to useless levels, how about another soultion. Let them use it all, when it's not being used by other customers. Use a rate limiting structure that throttles based on past usage. Those that use the LEAST bandwidth, get the HIGHEST priority in the queue. That way, those that are just looking for webpages or email get it nice and fast. The rest of the time those P2P users can use the bandwidth you're paying for but otherwise wouldn't be using. You could also simply prioritize all HTTP, Telnet, SSH and other interactive protocols to the top of the heap and let the FTP, P2P and other hungry protocols use the leftovers. 90% of the time, a FTP or P2P transfer is not time critical so the user of that service doesn't care if they get throttled a little when interactive traffic comes in. They probably wouldn't even notice.
Then you can monitor your "important" traffic and make sure you always have enough pipe for them and a little left over for the large file transfer users. Everyone is happy and users likely wouldn't even notice the difference.
Re:Some people seem to miss the point.
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Linus on DRM
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You're missing the point. The whole IDEA of a good crypto algorythm is that you can't decrypt without the key EVEN IF YOU HAVE THE ALGORYTHM. This is far beyond ROT-13 here. Why do you think distributed.net needed all those machines to brute-force RSA? They had the algorythm, but they couldn't just reverse it. The algorythm for AES is published on the internet, yet we still use it for secure communication.
Okay, one thing should be mentioned here. Can you try every possible key till you get the right one? Yes. The question becomes, how long will that take? In the case of a GOOD crypto algorythm, longer than it's worth. We're talking about YEARS with the use of a supercomputer here. So to use your analogy, sure, they might find out exactly how to make a key that will start my car. Of course, by the time they have tried all possible keys my car has been crushed and recycled.
Yeah, it's a keyhole. But it's also a keyhole with 2^128 possible keys for a 128 bit key. That's a LOT of keys to try before getting the right one. Now try that with a 512 bit key. How many BILLION keys are you going to try? And will you get the information in time for it to be meaningfull? What if you don't know the keylength? Keep in mind, a "normal" physical lock is kind of sloppy. You can open it by getting the tumblers "close enough" to the right positions. With good encryption, if you are off by ONE BIT, you don't open the lock.
Read some encryption theroy before being an asshat on/. next time.
That's not allowed these days. Spanking your kid can get you charged with child abuse and your kids taken away by the State. Kids eventually realize this, and realize there isn't much power that you actually have. A guy I work with had his daughter call and lie to social workers all because she was pissed at him. He went through hell trying to straighten that out. When the kids have the power, the parents are left with no way to punnish them and make them stick to it. Then there's the fact that high taxes require both parents to work, making it harder to even know what your kids are up to.
While it is true that LEGALLY, this is theft, many people do not ETHICLY agree. If you are correct, and MOST people do not believe it is theft, then it is the LAW that is WRONG. If this country is truely still democratic, the people have spoken and the law must be changed.
There are very good reasons why many people do not consider copyright infringement to be the same as physical theft. The largest one I can think of right now being that they do not deprive someone else of the item being "stolen". If I steal your car, you can't drive it anymore. If I copy your CD, you can still play your CD. I didn't deprive you of anything, so I don't see it as theft. Agree or not, it is a valid point.
IP is a legal fiction. It was created to "provide for the progress of science and the usefull arts". It can be reasonably argued that the current legal IP climate no longer does this. In fact, it can often supress progress. Yet another reason to look at what we are doing, why it isn't working, and try to design a better soultion for EVERYONE, not just the big corps.
Consider a thought excersise.. I have invented a Star Trek style Replicator. I can scan anything and make a PERFECT copy. I can also use matter around me as the energy source, so I'm recycling too.:p I can now go to my friend's place and copy his new Corvette. Did I steal from GM by doing so? Is this different from copying a CD? If so, how? IMO, it's the same problem on a grander scale. I also don't think laws should be passed to supress it. Something like that would have great benefits for all mankind, though some corps would likely have big problems. The benefits with CDs aren't as big, but the number of corps that will have problems is smaller too, so I think it's a reasonable comparison.
Really. It's the job of the Distro maintainer to make things easy to install and fix dependancy problems. That we are even discussing this tells me they aren't doing as good a job as they should be. That's not to say I could do it better, I don't have the time or the resources to compete in that area. But I think it's our job as "power users" to let our distro maintainers know what we think.
As for apps that are not included in the distro, well, that's up to the package maintainer how easy they want to make it for the end user and how much time they are willing to invest in that. I, personally, wouldn't want to provide a specific package for EVERY linux distro and take the time to fully test it. If I were to release something, I would likely make it work for the latest Redhat, Mandrake, and Debian. After that, I'd call it good. If I needed libs or lib versions not on those distros, I would include everything they needed in the package to make it work. If RPM or DEB can't embed other packages, they should be extended to do so. That way, I can download ONE package for MyCoolApp 3.2.1 that needs MyStupidLib 1.2.3 and get both. What if they allready have MyStupidLib 1.2.3? Just don't install that part, and maybe offer an "advanced user" download that doesn't include the lib for those that know what they are doing.
Or, if the distro has an Apt-Get GUI equivalant, make it so that a user could download and click a "helper file" that would add your FTP/HTTP site to the "sources" list and instruct it to install your app, resolving dependancies. Like the little bootstrap installers that are becoming so popular on Windows these days. Ideally, all the distros would standardize on a format for the helper file. Then the package maintainer would just have to make sure the RPMs/DEBs are available for download. The "Install Software" program would take care of it all with a few clicks of "Next" and "OK" from the user. And maybe requiring the root password as needed.
We are talking about END USERS here, the Win-Weenies, Lusers, creators of ID-10-T errors. If it's harder than download and click, IT'S TOO HARD. If they have to go library hunting, IT'S TOO HARD. And if we want Linux to succeed, we techies need to change it so that it's not too hard anymore.
What you don't seem to get is that even though it is legal to make MP3s, complilation discs, etc., THEY DON'T CARE. They don't want you to be able to do that, and if they had everything they wanted, you wouldn't be allowed to, PERIOD. That is why many of us hate them so much. They want to take away our rights to use media we paid for in the way we want to. All to preserve a dying business model.
This is supply and demand, they don't want to be subject to it. The fact is, people are finding fewer CDs that are worth buying while the prices keep going up! That leads to people not being willing to pay that price anymore and seeking another way to get what they want, which is probably just a song or two. In the real world, this should lead to prices on the CDs coming down to a level where most people will pay for them. This happened with computer software not so long ago, do you not remember when WordPerfect was charging $600 for a word processor? Now I can buy WP for $30, and I did. Back then, I copied it.
The industry is the root of the problem. Music copiers pushed it along, but the music industry created this problem for themselves. People were making tapes and sharing music long before the internet, it just made it faster. The fact is, people have been asking to pay for music online, they didn't want to offer it to us, so we did it ourselves. They could have offered us what we wanted for a price we were willing to pay, they refused. Does that make stealing from them right? Not really, but it doesn't make it right for them to destroy fair use either.
Piracy involves killing and such, I don't think it's fair to call someone who burns a CD the same as a person that burns a group of people alive, do you?
Except then I wouldn't be allowed to drive to work as I live 45 miles away and don't have an electric, pollution moving, car to drive. Greens just want different government regulation, in many cases they want MORE regulation. I want LESS, MUCH LESS regulation of what I do in my life. Libertarians are the only group that also wants to LOWER the size of government in ALL areas of our lives. Not just move the bloat to another module, in slashspeak.
Fact: If someone is busting down your door, you are justified in the use of deadly force to repel them. More so if he's built like this guy apparently is. His body can be considered a deadly weapon. In some states, you can even shoot THROUGH the door to stop the attack. In the case mentioned in the article, he walked away. But it could have eaisly gone the other way.
If you want to kill someone for bad business practices, yes you should see a shrink. If you want to defend yourself from the "muscle bound baboon" pummelling you into mush, fire at will.
The laws regarding self-defence vary from state to state. Here in Utah, the above is factual. In some states you aren't allowed to protect yourself at all, for any reason.
huh.. Don't tell my DirecTivo Utah isn't served by DBS!! I'll be pissed if it suddenly figgures it out!
DTV and DishNet are CONUS (Contenental US). That means what it says, the lower 48 have DBS. Even Canada and Mexico can receive our DBS signals much of the time. That's why all the DBS hacking goes on in Canada, liberal laws and they can pick up the signal. Hawaii and Alaska have some coverage, but the LOS to the satelites gets hard if you have anything in the way. It's more "flat" where our dishes tend to point more "up".
Test areas for a new service are eaiser to get going in populated areas at first. More potential testers, law of averages and all that. Not that I like Northpoint. It might interfere with my DBS that I don't have.;)
IMO, if it's going to be a pay-to-transmit game and everyone else has to pay, NorthPoint should too. If we're going to change the rules, they need to be the same for everyone.
It's nothing more than a plant. Just like sugarcane. The natives in some countries use it as a sweetener and some western people noticed and made a product out of it. It comes as a fine powder and actually works quite well. It's about 200x sweeter than sugar, and doesn't have the aftertaste that I don't like in artificial sweeteners.
How about this, ditch the "transcrypter" and replace it with a smart card or a small set of smart cards. You can then take your keys with you to other locations or "share" the files with others and give them your smart card to decrypt it. Like sharing tapes. The smart card would have to know if it is allowed to decrypt the program. Companies like Dish Network have shown a way to do it and still get the bandwidth advantages a broadcast style system provides. VOD style systems are inpractical as they require far too much bandwidth, far more than we can support at present.
Then you can allow the user to set time limits on the cards and such. Kind of like renting a tape or DVD, they have to "return" it in a reasonable ammount of time.
Honestly though, it is impossible to achieve an "uncrackable" system and once something is deployed it can't be changed in large ways because if backward compatibility is lost people will FREAK. So it will be cracked, and likely it will be crackable by "joe sixpack" in a modest amount of time. Then we're back where we started.
I really don't see this type of protection as being practical as a technological measure. Too many holes. Not to mention, high-quality video capture is allready cheap and easy. People will just do what they have been, take an analog capture over high quality connections and cables and encode it to MPEG. Then share that. You can get the equipment to do this for $200 or so. And it's USB with nice Windows drivers and software. Even the Lusers can figgure out how to use this stuff in most cases. Again, we're back where we started.
I believe the media companies have figgured this out and that is why they are going for the draconian laws to destroy fair-use. It's the only way they can get the protection they want. Now, if they just offered us what we want, most of us would be willing to pay for it. Heck, most of us pay for TV now anyway. It's not as much as advertisers pay, but it's time for a new market. BTW: I think there would be a fair number of people that would pay for network programming like they pay for HBO/SHO/etc... But we would require the same quality we get from the premium channels, multipule timezones, no commericals, and no logos on the screen durring the program. They would be premium channels. I would pay if I got East/West feeds, via satelite, with network shows ONLY, no news, sports, preemptions, logos, and minimal advertising BETWEEN shows ONLY. No in-show advertising. All that extra airtime could show the same schedule repeated in another time block. Just like Sci-Fi is always doing. It makes scheduling my Tivo MUCH eaiser. Also, proper guide data delivered to everyone so we can use PVRs on it without a hassle.
The ONLY way I watch TV is time-shifted PVR. I am willing to pay for that privilage if I get what I perceive to be value from it. Note, I don't care about not being able to do a digital rip from the Tivo. I just want to watch stuff. I make tapes for others that want to watch stuff they missed and I PVRed. For that, ripping would be nice since I can make a VideoCD faster than a VHS tape, but most of the people I let watch stuff can't play a VCD anyway. In the future I can see this comming up though. Just make it so I can make CD/DVD copies from mine and use something like SCMS. I can make copies from the original but not the copies. And allow me to make a single "master" CD for archival that can be used to make copies. Or maybe the smart card stuff I talked about could be used here. Lots of options.
My "fun idea" for a machine... A Tivo based unit like my DirecTivo. Include a MUCH faster CPU, and 100Mbps Ethernet. This would be a "video server". Sell cheap (under $100) boxes that have an ethernet port and a decoder. From there I can put the box at any TV I want and it will get its data from the server. Maybe make the server expandable for more tuners, that would be cool. Then maybe add connectivity to a computer to make the CD/DVD media for backup and sharing. Or, better for some people, a stand-alone unit that does this. In that unit, you could include some copy-protection. The idea being to keep things open and usefull. Oh, and NO PHONE LINE REQUIREMENTS. It has Ethernet, connect it to a broadband connection. If you don't have that, connect it to a router with auto-dialing.
Of course, this won't happen anytime soon because of the stupidity of the media companies. But if this were priced reasonably I'd be first in line to buy.
You can't just connect as many IRDs as you want to a dual LNB. You need a Multiswitch for more than 2. This device locks each side of a dual LNB to opposite polarity. So both are available to the Multiswitch at any time. Then it connects to the IRDs. When the IRD asks the switch for Left or Right polarization, the Multiswitch connects them to that side. By default, both sides of the LNB are able to tune to either polarization. You would connect each output to an IRD and they would both be good to go. For more than 2 IRDs, you need the MultiSwitch.
Multiswitches are also used on multi-sat dishes to select which satelite to look at. These are the simplest ones. The IRD must set the polarity itself. The more advanced units can see all sats and all polarizations at once and just connect the IRD asking for a signal to the sat and polarity they asked for.
The Quad LNB contains two Dual LNBs along with a multiswitch. The internal switch allows you to connect 4 IRDs. There is also a Twin LNB that allows 2 IRDs without extra switches. To the receiver, these look like dual LNBs connected to a multiswitch. It just means less wiring to have the switches built in. The down side is flexability. You can't cascade the switches to give you more receivers or to look at more satelites.
Doing a Google search on this stuff will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about satelite tech. Or check out www.dbsforums.com.. They have a ton of stuff too.
I doubt an optical cable would be affected by this. In the article he states that the only thing it changes is the directory on the CD. So you can't get a track list. But the songs are untouched. So if your CD or DVD player can play it and it has an optical out you should be able to connect to a soundcard optical in and record the bitstream. This would work fine since the optical out is just the digital data before it goes to the DAC. So there ya go, 1X CD ripping.
I honestly feel all this will be a moot point soon. Once the hackers get thier hands on this it will be cracked and they will distribute the programs to do it. Though they probably won't be able to take credit for it because of DMCA if they are in the US.
Well, I'm just an armchair engineer, but since you don't have a reply right now I'll chime in.
The answer is, as always, yes and no.
For the codecs and such, yes. You could make a programmable player and as long as you had enough cycles you could make it able to decode anything with downloaded firmware. For new media types, like CD-R vs. DVD you would need new hardware too. The optics for CD don't work on DVDs. But the DVD optics can read CDs.. so you can go backwards just like everything else in computers today. So what this gives you is a modular player unit that can accept various drive types for media, and has a programmable DSP to run the decoders on. So you could download a Ogg Vorbis decoder for your player that used to do MP3 only, for example. But you would have to buy hardware to be able to play CDs instead of just flash cards or whatever it was able to do before.
Yes, it would give customers a lot of freedom. But it would probably cost a little more and be a little bulkier. And eaiser to break since you have peices that have to be able to come apart. Would it sell? To geeks, sure, you could make a few bucks. To joe user? Hmmm... don't know. Some would like it I'm sure. Put it in a really cool case with pretty colors as an option and you might get somewhere. If a big name like Sony built and marketed it, even better chance.
I don't mean to flame, FreeNET is excellent. But it NEEDS a real search engine. Until Joe User can just type a search term in and get a list of hyperlinks to possible hits it will not work as a Napster replacement. It also needs to be packaged as an InstallShield style app for Win32. With minimal setup required. If it's not sufficiently brain dead easy it won't take off. And with something like MP3s, you want as many people as possible so that you can get the best possible transfer speed and selection. Until then, people will use whatever is easy to set up and use.
You don't get it. It's not about the color of the light. It's about the flicker. I have not seen any flourescents that don't flicker at mains frequency. You can't see it, but it does affect many people. I disabled the lights above my desk at the office for this reason. My eyes are sensitive to the flickering of the lights. Until they give a replacement for incandesant that does not flicker AT ALL, I will not buy them. As it is I use lights hardly at all. In my house there is often ONE light running. I use less power than anyone I know.
For a demonstration of flicker set your monitor refresh to 60hz for the US or 50hz in the UK and Europe. Use that for a few days and tell me the flicker isn't a problem.
Nope again. I've seen ads for cable pullers in this area. About $10/hr. A fair bit above the minimum, last I looked.
Note, I said people on/... There are not going to be many/.ers at minimum wage. Those who make minimum have better things to buy than a computer and internet access. You know, things like food.
That is not to belittle those who DO work for that level of pay or those who are below the poverty line. Just to point out that those people are probably not spending thier time on/..
Ahh, but there is. Corps don't all agree on everything. I doubt Sun would enforce such a thing with MSIDs for example. Or IBM... Perhaps they would. But, like I said, others will fill the gap. So maybe you can't buy from Company X.. But Company Y will be happy to take your money. As long as there are no laws requiring something like that there will always be a business willing to work with you. It just means it will be inconvienent for you. So, what are your principles worth?
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EVs are cool, but have limitations in practical use that Hybrids don't.
Limited range: The GOOD EVs I've seen can go about 100 miles per charge.
Recharge time: HOURS...
Recharge locations: Limited.
Size: Small.
I drive 80-100 miles per day for my commute and around town stuff. EVs don't have the range. They may be rated for very close to it, but in bad conditions they don't perform. For example, cold weather kills battery efficiency. I live in Utah, it's cold at least half the year here! I also can't wait hours for a recharge and could only realisticly charge at home. I have too much to do. I'm 6'4" and 350lbs, the small cars like the EV1 just don't cut it. I also need reasonable cargo space when I go shopping and such. A Corolla is about as small as I can go.
On the other hand, the 04 Prius offers me more space than a Corolla (close to the Camry), "recharge" times of about 5 minutes (same as a regular car), the ability to "charge" anywhere I want to (there are gas stations everywhere), and about 40-50 MPG on the highway (most of my driving, calculated milage). Range is 400-500 miles per "charge". And with 295 lb-ft of torque (0-1200 RPM), off the line, it can even feel "sporty" to drive!
EVs can't match that. No current battery comes anywhere near the energy density of gasoline. Add the charge times, and other limitations, and that rules out EVs as nothing more than a curiousity for 90% of people. Sure, you could use a different car for long distance trips and such, but now you're telling people that they need *2* cars to do what *1* could before. That's a hard sell, and one of the many reasons the EV1 didn't sell well and was pulled from the market.
Hybrids aren't perfect, but they are a step up from pure gas and a good stepping stone toward a 100% renewable vehicle. Most importanly, they are here NOW, have a few years and a generation behined them (the 04 is gen2 of Toyota's tech, 2000 IIRC is the first Prius model in the US). What we learn from them can be applied to EVs over time, and thier batteries being mass produced could help drop the production costs to the level where we could use the NiMH or Li-Ion type batteries in an affordable EV. IMO, it's the right way to evolve the tech. Start with something that has noticable benefits, that is practical with existing infrastructure, and that people will pay for today. I see Hybrids as a "proof of concept" that cleaner cars can do all the same things regular cars can, and can use less gas and make less polution in the process. That's a GOOD THING.
I think people would accept a shorter time between refueling. The catch is that is has to be a FAST refuel. I can "gas up" in 5 minutes or less, including the time to get off the freeway and back. Battery powered electrics can't come anywhere near this refuel speed. Even the "fast charger" for my cellphone li-ion takes a couple hours to charge. This is a problem because people *WILL* forget to plug the car in and not be able to drive to work the next day. They will think about this when they are considering thier options. This is a deal-breaker for me, and I'm good at remembering to plug things in.
;)
You also have to consider the road-trip options. People buying a car consider ALL the uses they want to put that car to. Even the once a year type uses. If they want to be able to drive 600 miles to visit the family, a 100 mile range battery powered electric that needs 2 hour recharges doesn't look real practical, does it? When battery powered cars cost more, and do less, people won't buy them. More so if they need ANOTHER car on top of that with an ICE just so they can do everything they need to do.
Refueling is also inconvienent and having to do it more often would make it even more so. This is another downside. IMO, the best short-term option is to combine the best of both worlds with the hybrid cars. The problem is, they are too small for me right now. I'm a big guy, 6'4" 300lbs. I simply don't fit in those small cars. If they ditched the mostly useless rear seat and made one with enough legroom for a tall person while still being able to reach the controls, with a reasonably sized trunk for traveling/shopping, I might think about it. It would be great for my 45 mile commute. I just do the best I can with what I have and get about 35MPG. Not so bad, considering the other option was a 15MPG SUV.
You don't get it. What we, the hackers, can do is irrevelant. They don't really care so much about us, they know that can't stop *US* with tech. And they know we represent all of about 1% of the TV-watching public. We simply don't matter to them.
They care about joe-sixpack. This *WILL* stop him and all the other "lusers" because *THEY* don't have the technical skill to hack the TiVo, or build a MythTV box. On top of that, it will be *ILLEGAL* to sell a box (or a card for your MythTV box for that matter) that can ignore the broadcast flag. This will effectively OBLITERATE "fair-use" for Digital/HDTV. PVRs aren't a critical mass yet and users of those boxes simply don't have the lobby power we need to fight this. We *MUST* get the "lusers" involved if we intend to win this battle. And if we don't win, say goodbye to your TiVo come 2006. It won't work anymore and they won't be allowed to sell you one that you will be willing to pay for as it will be crippled with this broadcast flag BS.
But if you're a libretarian, maybe you think it ought to be legal to break into homes if you're strong enough to break down the front door or cleaver enough to pick the lock. And of course, it's ok for spammers to forge headers, use deceptive subject lines, impersonate unsuspecting users, intentionally misspell words or make tricky use of whitespace or embed special html tages for no purpose other than to get past filters, all to hock fraudulent scams and questional merchandise. Call my a pink liberal commie, but I think it ought to be illegal to use such fraudulent, bad-faith tactics. And it's not ok to break into my home, even on the rare occasion when I happen to forget to lock the door!
Nope. Breaking into your home, locked or not, would be an initiation of force against you. Stopping such activity (or at least having laws and police in an attempt to) is a valid use of government to every libertarian I have met. Libertarians also belive government should be able to prevent fraud. I think that the writer of the article simply doesn't understand the things spammers do to get past filters and how they harm the network. IMO, any libertarian, once informed by a techie, would agree that 90% or more of the spam is sent by people that are engaging in fraud or the online-equivilant of lock picking and theft of computer resources. Once they realize this, any libertarian would be forced to conclude that such activities fall under any reasonable deffinition of "initiation of force".
IMO, the best soultion is to include things like deliberately obscuring words, sender identity, addresses, headers, creating/using viruses that create relay networks and other circumvention technologies in the computer crimes legislation on the books as cracking. Not banning "Spam"/UCE per-se, but the fradulant delivery and hijacking of computers and networks that they engage in now.
I don't know why some packet shaper hasn't come along to do this. The idea is simple, probably somewhat complex to actually impliment, but not too hard I would think.
Basicly, everyone has a "priority ranking" in the system based on IP address. Your priority rank is the inverse of your usage averaged over some time period. So if you you use it a lot, your priority is lower down to some threshold. If the pipe is not busy, and you're the only one on, you get all of it regardless of priority. If someone else comes on, they get higher priority than you when they are using the net. This helps evenly distribute bandwidth to many clients, while not letting one big user harm the connection for the light users. But when there aren't that many users, the heaver users get big bandwidth. This way, everyone gets what they want and the heavy users are still happy without caps and worrying about per-meg charges and such. They just get lower speeds durring times when the network is congested. The light users see a blazingly fast connection all the time even if some P2P user has thier P2P app running 24/7.
pfffttt... right..
I have some Mandrake 9.1 discs burned on Imation CD-Rs that would say otherwise. Disc 1 can't even boot anymore. It worked fine when I burned it a couple months ago, but now has errors. I have some MP3 CDs burned on those as well that have similiar problems. I wouldn't trust these things with anything beyond basic use-and-toss right now. The Mandrake discs were stored indoors, the MP3s were in my car. I can kind of understand the ones in the car, it gets hot in there in the summer, but they were never in direct sunlight. I've had cheap green-dye generic CD-Rs last longer in my car.
The ones I've found to be the best that I can buy at the store right now are Verbatum Datalife PLUS. They seem to be able to hold up to some decent abuse. If I could still find them, I would buy Gold discs.. I have a bunch of old discs burned on those from the days of 2x burners that still read perfectly. Many are audio CDs, which lack the extra error correction that data CDs have. I think I paid $8/ea at the time, but not having to worry about them is worth extra $. Not that I would pay that much for anything but the most important data. I think I'm going to buy some Mitsui Gold discs and see how those stand up to abuse.
Rather than changing more or limiting the bandwidth to useless levels, how about another soultion. Let them use it all, when it's not being used by other customers. Use a rate limiting structure that throttles based on past usage. Those that use the LEAST bandwidth, get the HIGHEST priority in the queue. That way, those that are just looking for webpages or email get it nice and fast. The rest of the time those P2P users can use the bandwidth you're paying for but otherwise wouldn't be using. You could also simply prioritize all HTTP, Telnet, SSH and other interactive protocols to the top of the heap and let the FTP, P2P and other hungry protocols use the leftovers. 90% of the time, a FTP or P2P transfer is not time critical so the user of that service doesn't care if they get throttled a little when interactive traffic comes in. They probably wouldn't even notice.
Then you can monitor your "important" traffic and make sure you always have enough pipe for them and a little left over for the large file transfer users. Everyone is happy and users likely wouldn't even notice the difference.
You're missing the point. The whole IDEA of a good crypto algorythm is that you can't decrypt without the key EVEN IF YOU HAVE THE ALGORYTHM. This is far beyond ROT-13 here. Why do you think distributed.net needed all those machines to brute-force RSA? They had the algorythm, but they couldn't just reverse it. The algorythm for AES is published on the internet, yet we still use it for secure communication.
/. next time.
Okay, one thing should be mentioned here. Can you try every possible key till you get the right one? Yes. The question becomes, how long will that take? In the case of a GOOD crypto algorythm, longer than it's worth. We're talking about YEARS with the use of a supercomputer here. So to use your analogy, sure, they might find out exactly how to make a key that will start my car. Of course, by the time they have tried all possible keys my car has been crushed and recycled.
Yeah, it's a keyhole. But it's also a keyhole with 2^128 possible keys for a 128 bit key. That's a LOT of keys to try before getting the right one. Now try that with a 512 bit key. How many BILLION keys are you going to try? And will you get the information in time for it to be meaningfull? What if you don't know the keylength? Keep in mind, a "normal" physical lock is kind of sloppy. You can open it by getting the tumblers "close enough" to the right positions. With good encryption, if you are off by ONE BIT, you don't open the lock.
Read some encryption theroy before being an asshat on
That's not allowed these days. Spanking your kid can get you charged with child abuse and your kids taken away by the State. Kids eventually realize this, and realize there isn't much power that you actually have. A guy I work with had his daughter call and lie to social workers all because she was pissed at him. He went through hell trying to straighten that out. When the kids have the power, the parents are left with no way to punnish them and make them stick to it. Then there's the fact that high taxes require both parents to work, making it harder to even know what your kids are up to.
While it is true that LEGALLY, this is theft, many people do not ETHICLY agree. If you are correct, and MOST people do not believe it is theft, then it is the LAW that is WRONG. If this country is truely still democratic, the people have spoken and the law must be changed.
:p I can now go to my friend's place and copy his new Corvette. Did I steal from GM by doing so? Is this different from copying a CD? If so, how? IMO, it's the same problem on a grander scale. I also don't think laws should be passed to supress it. Something like that would have great benefits for all mankind, though some corps would likely have big problems. The benefits with CDs aren't as big, but the number of corps that will have problems is smaller too, so I think it's a reasonable comparison.
There are very good reasons why many people do not consider copyright infringement to be the same as physical theft. The largest one I can think of right now being that they do not deprive someone else of the item being "stolen". If I steal your car, you can't drive it anymore. If I copy your CD, you can still play your CD. I didn't deprive you of anything, so I don't see it as theft. Agree or not, it is a valid point.
IP is a legal fiction. It was created to "provide for the progress of science and the usefull arts". It can be reasonably argued that the current legal IP climate no longer does this. In fact, it can often supress progress. Yet another reason to look at what we are doing, why it isn't working, and try to design a better soultion for EVERYONE, not just the big corps.
Consider a thought excersise.. I have invented a Star Trek style Replicator. I can scan anything and make a PERFECT copy. I can also use matter around me as the energy source, so I'm recycling too.
Really. It's the job of the Distro maintainer to make things easy to install and fix dependancy problems. That we are even discussing this tells me they aren't doing as good a job as they should be. That's not to say I could do it better, I don't have the time or the resources to compete in that area. But I think it's our job as "power users" to let our distro maintainers know what we think.
As for apps that are not included in the distro, well, that's up to the package maintainer how easy they want to make it for the end user and how much time they are willing to invest in that. I, personally, wouldn't want to provide a specific package for EVERY linux distro and take the time to fully test it. If I were to release something, I would likely make it work for the latest Redhat, Mandrake, and Debian. After that, I'd call it good. If I needed libs or lib versions not on those distros, I would include everything they needed in the package to make it work. If RPM or DEB can't embed other packages, they should be extended to do so. That way, I can download ONE package for MyCoolApp 3.2.1 that needs MyStupidLib 1.2.3 and get both. What if they allready have MyStupidLib 1.2.3? Just don't install that part, and maybe offer an "advanced user" download that doesn't include the lib for those that know what they are doing.
Or, if the distro has an Apt-Get GUI equivalant, make it so that a user could download and click a "helper file" that would add your FTP/HTTP site to the "sources" list and instruct it to install your app, resolving dependancies. Like the little bootstrap installers that are becoming so popular on Windows these days. Ideally, all the distros would standardize on a format for the helper file. Then the package maintainer would just have to make sure the RPMs/DEBs are available for download. The "Install Software" program would take care of it all with a few clicks of "Next" and "OK" from the user. And maybe requiring the root password as needed.
We are talking about END USERS here, the Win-Weenies, Lusers, creators of ID-10-T errors. If it's harder than download and click, IT'S TOO HARD. If they have to go library hunting, IT'S TOO HARD. And if we want Linux to succeed, we techies need to change it so that it's not too hard anymore.
TiVo units can work over Ethernet. All Series 2 units have USB ports that will accept many off the shelf USB-Ethernet devices.
What you don't seem to get is that even though it is legal to make MP3s, complilation discs, etc., THEY DON'T CARE. They don't want you to be able to do that, and if they had everything they wanted, you wouldn't be allowed to, PERIOD. That is why many of us hate them so much. They want to take away our rights to use media we paid for in the way we want to. All to preserve a dying business model.
This is supply and demand, they don't want to be subject to it. The fact is, people are finding fewer CDs that are worth buying while the prices keep going up! That leads to people not being willing to pay that price anymore and seeking another way to get what they want, which is probably just a song or two. In the real world, this should lead to prices on the CDs coming down to a level where most people will pay for them. This happened with computer software not so long ago, do you not remember when WordPerfect was charging $600 for a word processor? Now I can buy WP for $30, and I did. Back then, I copied it.
The industry is the root of the problem. Music copiers pushed it along, but the music industry created this problem for themselves. People were making tapes and sharing music long before the internet, it just made it faster. The fact is, people have been asking to pay for music online, they didn't want to offer it to us, so we did it ourselves. They could have offered us what we wanted for a price we were willing to pay, they refused. Does that make stealing from them right? Not really, but it doesn't make it right for them to destroy fair use either.
Piracy involves killing and such, I don't think it's fair to call someone who burns a CD the same as a person that burns a group of people alive, do you?
Except then I wouldn't be allowed to drive to work as I live 45 miles away and don't have an electric, pollution moving, car to drive. Greens just want different government regulation, in many cases they want MORE regulation. I want LESS, MUCH LESS regulation of what I do in my life. Libertarians are the only group that also wants to LOWER the size of government in ALL areas of our lives. Not just move the bloat to another module, in slashspeak.
Ahem.
Fact: If someone is busting down your door, you are justified in the use of deadly force to repel them. More so if he's built like this guy apparently is. His body can be considered a deadly weapon. In some states, you can even shoot THROUGH the door to stop the attack. In the case mentioned in the article, he walked away. But it could have eaisly gone the other way.
If you want to kill someone for bad business practices, yes you should see a shrink. If you want to defend yourself from the "muscle bound baboon" pummelling you into mush, fire at will.
The laws regarding self-defence vary from state to state. Here in Utah, the above is factual. In some states you aren't allowed to protect yourself at all, for any reason.
huh.. Don't tell my DirecTivo Utah isn't served by DBS!! I'll be pissed if it suddenly figgures it out!
;)
DTV and DishNet are CONUS (Contenental US). That means what it says, the lower 48 have DBS. Even Canada and Mexico can receive our DBS signals much of the time. That's why all the DBS hacking goes on in Canada, liberal laws and they can pick up the signal. Hawaii and Alaska have some coverage, but the LOS to the satelites gets hard if you have anything in the way. It's more "flat" where our dishes tend to point more "up".
Test areas for a new service are eaiser to get going in populated areas at first. More potential testers, law of averages and all that. Not that I like Northpoint. It might interfere with my DBS that I don't have.
IMO, if it's going to be a pay-to-transmit game and everyone else has to pay, NorthPoint should too. If we're going to change the rules, they need to be the same for everyone.
It's nothing more than a plant. Just like sugarcane. The natives in some countries use it as a sweetener and some western people noticed and made a product out of it. It comes as a fine powder and actually works quite well. It's about 200x sweeter than sugar, and doesn't have the aftertaste that I don't like in artificial sweeteners.
How about this, ditch the "transcrypter" and replace it with a smart card or a small set of smart cards. You can then take your keys with you to other locations or "share" the files with others and give them your smart card to decrypt it. Like sharing tapes. The smart card would have to know if it is allowed to decrypt the program. Companies like Dish Network have shown a way to do it and still get the bandwidth advantages a broadcast style system provides. VOD style systems are inpractical as they require far too much bandwidth, far more than we can support at present.
Then you can allow the user to set time limits on the cards and such. Kind of like renting a tape or DVD, they have to "return" it in a reasonable ammount of time.
Honestly though, it is impossible to achieve an "uncrackable" system and once something is deployed it can't be changed in large ways because if backward compatibility is lost people will FREAK. So it will be cracked, and likely it will be crackable by "joe sixpack" in a modest amount of time. Then we're back where we started.
I really don't see this type of protection as being practical as a technological measure. Too many holes. Not to mention, high-quality video capture is allready cheap and easy. People will just do what they have been, take an analog capture over high quality connections and cables and encode it to MPEG. Then share that. You can get the equipment to do this for $200 or so. And it's USB with nice Windows drivers and software. Even the Lusers can figgure out how to use this stuff in most cases. Again, we're back where we started.
I believe the media companies have figgured this out and that is why they are going for the draconian laws to destroy fair-use. It's the only way they can get the protection they want. Now, if they just offered us what we want, most of us would be willing to pay for it. Heck, most of us pay for TV now anyway. It's not as much as advertisers pay, but it's time for a new market. BTW: I think there would be a fair number of people that would pay for network programming like they pay for HBO/SHO/etc... But we would require the same quality we get from the premium channels, multipule timezones, no commericals, and no logos on the screen durring the program. They would be premium channels. I would pay if I got East/West feeds, via satelite, with network shows ONLY, no news, sports, preemptions, logos, and minimal advertising BETWEEN shows ONLY. No in-show advertising. All that extra airtime could show the same schedule repeated in another time block. Just like Sci-Fi is always doing. It makes scheduling my Tivo MUCH eaiser. Also, proper guide data delivered to everyone so we can use PVRs on it without a hassle.
The ONLY way I watch TV is time-shifted PVR. I am willing to pay for that privilage if I get what I perceive to be value from it. Note, I don't care about not being able to do a digital rip from the Tivo. I just want to watch stuff. I make tapes for others that want to watch stuff they missed and I PVRed. For that, ripping would be nice since I can make a VideoCD faster than a VHS tape, but most of the people I let watch stuff can't play a VCD anyway. In the future I can see this comming up though. Just make it so I can make CD/DVD copies from mine and use something like SCMS. I can make copies from the original but not the copies. And allow me to make a single "master" CD for archival that can be used to make copies. Or maybe the smart card stuff I talked about could be used here. Lots of options.
My "fun idea" for a machine... A Tivo based unit like my DirecTivo. Include a MUCH faster CPU, and 100Mbps Ethernet. This would be a "video server". Sell cheap (under $100) boxes that have an ethernet port and a decoder. From there I can put the box at any TV I want and it will get its data from the server. Maybe make the server expandable for more tuners, that would be cool. Then maybe add connectivity to a computer to make the CD/DVD media for backup and sharing. Or, better for some people, a stand-alone unit that does this. In that unit, you could include some copy-protection. The idea being to keep things open and usefull. Oh, and NO PHONE LINE REQUIREMENTS. It has Ethernet, connect it to a broadband connection. If you don't have that, connect it to a router with auto-dialing.
Of course, this won't happen anytime soon because of the stupidity of the media companies. But if this were priced reasonably I'd be first in line to buy.
Just a slight correction...
You can't just connect as many IRDs as you want to a dual LNB. You need a Multiswitch for more than 2. This device locks each side of a dual LNB to opposite polarity. So both are available to the Multiswitch at any time. Then it connects to the IRDs. When the IRD asks the switch for Left or Right polarization, the Multiswitch connects them to that side. By default, both sides of the LNB are able to tune to either polarization. You would connect each output to an IRD and they would both be good to go. For more than 2 IRDs, you need the MultiSwitch.
Multiswitches are also used on multi-sat dishes to select which satelite to look at. These are the simplest ones. The IRD must set the polarity itself. The more advanced units can see all sats and all polarizations at once and just connect the IRD asking for a signal to the sat and polarity they asked for.
The Quad LNB contains two Dual LNBs along with a multiswitch. The internal switch allows you to connect 4 IRDs. There is also a Twin LNB that allows 2 IRDs without extra switches. To the receiver, these look like dual LNBs connected to a multiswitch. It just means less wiring to have the switches built in. The down side is flexability. You can't cascade the switches to give you more receivers or to look at more satelites.
Doing a Google search on this stuff will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about satelite tech. Or check out www.dbsforums.com.. They have a ton of stuff too.
I doubt an optical cable would be affected by this. In the article he states that the only thing it changes is the directory on the CD. So you can't get a track list. But the songs are untouched. So if your CD or DVD player can play it and it has an optical out you should be able to connect to a soundcard optical in and record the bitstream. This would work fine since the optical out is just the digital data before it goes to the DAC. So there ya go, 1X CD ripping.
I honestly feel all this will be a moot point soon. Once the hackers get thier hands on this it will be cracked and they will distribute the programs to do it. Though they probably won't be able to take credit for it because of DMCA if they are in the US.
Well, I'm just an armchair engineer, but since you don't have a reply right now I'll chime in.
The answer is, as always, yes and no.
For the codecs and such, yes. You could make a programmable player and as long as you had enough cycles you could make it able to decode anything with downloaded firmware. For new media types, like CD-R vs. DVD you would need new hardware too. The optics for CD don't work on DVDs. But the DVD optics can read CDs.. so you can go backwards just like everything else in computers today. So what this gives you is a modular player unit that can accept various drive types for media, and has a programmable DSP to run the decoders on. So you could download a Ogg Vorbis decoder for your player that used to do MP3 only, for example. But you would have to buy hardware to be able to play CDs instead of just flash cards or whatever it was able to do before.
Yes, it would give customers a lot of freedom. But it would probably cost a little more and be a little bulkier. And eaiser to break since you have peices that have to be able to come apart. Would it sell? To geeks, sure, you could make a few bucks. To joe user? Hmmm... don't know. Some would like it I'm sure. Put it in a really cool case with pretty colors as an option and you might get somewhere. If a big name like Sony built and marketed it, even better chance.
I don't mean to flame, FreeNET is excellent. But it NEEDS a real search engine. Until Joe User can just type a search term in and get a list of hyperlinks to possible hits it will not work as a Napster replacement. It also needs to be packaged as an InstallShield style app for Win32. With minimal setup required. If it's not sufficiently brain dead easy it won't take off. And with something like MP3s, you want as many people as possible so that you can get the best possible transfer speed and selection. Until then, people will use whatever is easy to set up and use.
You don't get it. It's not about the color of the light. It's about the flicker. I have not seen any flourescents that don't flicker at mains frequency. You can't see it, but it does affect many people. I disabled the lights above my desk at the office for this reason. My eyes are sensitive to the flickering of the lights. Until they give a replacement for incandesant that does not flicker AT ALL, I will not buy them. As it is I use lights hardly at all. In my house there is often ONE light running. I use less power than anyone I know.
For a demonstration of flicker set your monitor refresh to 60hz for the US or 50hz in the UK and Europe. Use that for a few days and tell me the flicker isn't a problem.
Nope again. I've seen ads for cable pullers in this area. About $10/hr. A fair bit above the minimum, last I looked.
/... There are not going to be many /.ers at minimum wage. Those who make minimum have better things to buy than a computer and internet access. You know, things like food.
/..
Note, I said people on
That is not to belittle those who DO work for that level of pay or those who are below the poverty line. Just to point out that those people are probably not spending thier time on
Ahh, but there is. Corps don't all agree on everything. I doubt Sun would enforce such a thing with MSIDs for example. Or IBM... Perhaps they would. But, like I said, others will fill the gap. So maybe you can't buy from Company X.. But Company Y will be happy to take your money. As long as there are no laws requiring something like that there will always be a business willing to work with you. It just means it will be inconvienent for you. So, what are your principles worth?