The only type of object you'd want to send quickly halfway around the world badly enough you would pay for a whole rocket launch is a nuclear warhead. But typically the government handles such deliveries.
Heh, KPDF has a checkbox for whether you want it to respect that DRM. Um, no thanks. (There's also a compile-time option to make it mandatory, for the wussier binary distros.)
So should we should shut down all ISPs, because unspecified illegal traffic may be flowing from their routers?
The only difference here (besides that there is no specific allegation of illegal traffic in this case), is that it's more difficult to tell who's a router and who's the source. I can understand governments getting antsy about that, but making laws against it is about as stupid as making a law that P==NP. The law is just denying a property of information, namely, that practical anonymity is feasible.
Franklin is not placing limits on the types of liberty and security that it's acceptable to trade, but rather making a blanket statement that liberty is essential and security is temporary.
That said: anonymous speech is pretty darn essential. I hope we can agree that free speech is essential, and in the face of governments that happily restrict it, anonymity is a necessary tool to exercise that right without getting imprisoned or killed. And the security we would gain is temporary - if the ter'ists, pedophiles, Holocaust deniers, or pirates are using Tor, and we shut it down, they'll just switch to something else.
But you don't know its altitude. Even with position and angular velocity measurements of adequate precision, you'd have no information on only one pass with which to devise its true linear velocity; multiple three-dimensional orbits could produce the measured two-dimensional results.
I will admit I haven't tried the math involved, but I can't think of a case where multiple orbits could produce the same curve at the same speed. Considering the one-dimensional case, higher orbits would appear slower, and elliptical orbits would appear faster around the perigee and slower around the apogee. When you're not in the orbital plane, I expect the apparent curvature would further help to fix the altitude.
Anyway, I can see how this would get expensive (cameras, CPU time), but I really don't think it's that impractical. However, doing it visually has other advantages over radar. For one, it's passive, so you can't detect it. Also, I suspect it would be easier to design a satellite to not reflect certain bands of radar back towards Earth, than to not reflect sunlight.
Yes, I have gone out and viewed the satellites going past. Living near a city, though, I haven't been able to see much more than Iridium flares and the ISS, though. So I guess the main problem would be getting enough good cameras.
You can infer time by carefully recording the times the images were taken. The exposures would ideally be short enough that a streak would span several images - then each endpoint gives you a coordinate in time and angular space, and you can easily infer the direction. You know the satellite's motion is inertial, so you should be able to figure the orbit. (You'd also need to throw away data that isn't plausible for an orbit, which you'd get plenty of from airplanes.)
I only said cover the horizon because, looking at data from heavens-above, it seems like it's more likely for the satellites to be visible there, and near dawn and dusk. You could cover a bigger area if you wanted.
Admittedly, you probably wouldn't get the best quality data. But it should be good enough for you to guess at the next visible pass, especially if you have multiple sites. (Keep in mind this is the kind of thing you could setup in a backyard in Nevada without anyone noticing.) And the end goal isn't to rendezvous with it or shoot it down, it's to know when it's visible so you can hide your doomsday devices.
The thing is, issues like this aren't the actual reason they're not honoring the warranty. They're doing it because they think it benefits them to make any excuse possible so they don't have to fix it. And it does, in the short term, though I suspect it isn't worth the lost goodwill. There aren't that many Linux users, so you aren't saving much money by screwing them. But they are a well-connected, vocal minority, as this article being on the front page shows.
Wow, that's horrible. Not just dialup users, but I suspect all but the most hopeless MySpace users would realize no content could be worth putting up with such a horrible website. No copy-n-paste, can't select text for something to do while reading, etc...
That reminds me: I've noticed some websites are getting around the popup blocker by launching windows when I click on the text. That's not cool. Maybe we should design the blocker to deny by default, and try to identify legit reasons (e.g. non-dragging click on image or underlined text) to open new windows, instead of just blocking the most common abuses.
Whether the medium is push or pull is irrelevant, so as far as ad-blocking goes, there's no difference between TV and the Web.
Basically: ad blocking is not illegal, because you haven't signed anything saying you'll view the ads. It so happens that enough people do to make advertising profitable, but this is a happy accident, not some corporate right.
You could say there's an implied contract that you'll view the ads, and thus blocking them is somehow wrong. Even if that's true, though, the implied contract is broken if the ads get too annoying.
Well, you can count on luck if you're constantly vigilant. Point a bunch of digital cameras at the sky, taking long-exposure images during dusk and dawn. Enough cameras to cover the horizon. Control them with a computer. Then you just need an automated system to pick out streaks with the right curvature, compute their orbits, and correlate them against your database of known targets. If you find one you haven't seen before, you can probably extract enough information to find it on its next pass and take more precise measurements. Leave this system on for a few months and you're bound to find quite a few interesting objects. I'd say it would take a few grad students a few months, and say $15000 in equipment, to set this up.
I'm not an expert, but... changing the orbit of satellites is hard. I could maybe see changing them by a few degrees to get better coverage of some area, weeks before we thought we would need it. But it's not like someone says, "Hey look, I see some terrorist activity, divert 3 more spy satellites to the area immediately!".
According to my back-of-the-envelope calculation (ratings info from Wikipedia), they get 80 cents to show you 20 minutes of ads. So if they get more than half of that $1.99, selling you an ad-free version is quite worth their while. (And in fact, big surprise, we're the ones getting screwed.)
Suppose the Republicans and Democrats became unbalanced enough that you could be reasonably sure which party would win the presidency. Are you then throwing away your vote if you vote on the probable loser? Would you really prefer a one-party system, the logical consequence of never "throwing away" your vote?
You won't get a cookie if you happened to vote for the winner. You won't get more representation, your vote isn't somehow worth more. To me, voting on someone you don't think is the best candidate, independently of his chances, is actually throwing away your vote - you forfeited your chance to mold the country to your ideals, and instead just pushed it a little farther towards wherever it's going anyway.
I definitely agree that mid-term elections are important too, though.
I'd be really interested to hear of a single US senator or congressman who has their own opinion on copyright. Instead, we have two parties full of people who don't even bother to think about anything that's not in CNN's top five list of things we should fear, and for everything else, trust whoever gives them the most money.
Unfortunately, even if there were such politicians, the chances are minimal that I'd live in the right place to vote for them. Our democracy is useless for small yet non-geographical issues. Sigh.
If a community is full of Christians and they vote along their beliefs, does that mean the church controls the city?
Yes, if their beliefs involve voting as the church does for fear of divine retribution. That's why we have the separation of church and state.
However, this is more like a lot of people that don't even live in the community voting on for an ordinance that will hurt the community, but will benefit the surrounding areas. Do these Microsoft partner companies have any *technical* interest in the standard?
It's also worth mentioning that sales tax is applied by the state, and if you order stuff from out of state, you typically don't have to pay tax at all. (Though in some states you're supposed to report that stuff on your income tax return.)
So how do I ask the owner? There isn't any good way, certainly none that can be automated. Well, other than asking his router, that is.
Hooking up to someone else's cordless phone base station currently requires breaking some sort of security. And even before it did, there was a reasonable expectation that people wouldn't do that. Mostly because nobody walked around with devices specifically designed to, as they do with WiFi.
Btw, how is it not like running a webserver? Just saying it's not doesn't make that true. The only differences are the medium (Internet rather than radio), the information offered (Slashdot rather than the Internet), and the protocol (HTTP rather than 802.11g). In both cases, you're "stealing" bandwidth from the owner, and in both cases, it's OK, because a computer program gave you permission on the owner's behalf.
I mostly agree with the sibling AC who contested those points, but I just want to add:
If an unsecured wireless network means "don't use", then how would you even make a wireless network saying "use me"? I can think of putting something to that effect in the SSID, or using a meatspace sign. Both of these have the huge disadvantage that they can't be automated. Suppose I want my device to always be connected to the internet when there's a connection it has permission to use. Right now, I can just check the box that says "connect to unsecured networks". But if we assume unsecured means forbidden, it's pretty much impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
I've definately seen people whose opinion on passwords is, "Hey, it's my equipment, why should I ever have to enter a password?"
The only type of object you'd want to send quickly halfway around the world badly enough you would pay for a whole rocket launch is a nuclear warhead. But typically the government handles such deliveries.
You can also make an AM radio with your CRT monitor.
Heh, KPDF has a checkbox for whether you want it to respect that DRM. Um, no thanks. (There's also a compile-time option to make it mandatory, for the wussier binary distros.)
Why is that standard practice? That's disgusting!
Hopefully the one that doesn't infringe on basic human rights such as free speech and habeas corpus.
So should we should shut down all ISPs, because unspecified illegal traffic may be flowing from their routers?
The only difference here (besides that there is no specific allegation of illegal traffic in this case), is that it's more difficult to tell who's a router and who's the source. I can understand governments getting antsy about that, but making laws against it is about as stupid as making a law that P==NP. The law is just denying a property of information, namely, that practical anonymity is feasible.
Franklin is not placing limits on the types of liberty and security that it's acceptable to trade, but rather making a blanket statement that liberty is essential and security is temporary.
That said: anonymous speech is pretty darn essential. I hope we can agree that free speech is essential, and in the face of governments that happily restrict it, anonymity is a necessary tool to exercise that right without getting imprisoned or killed. And the security we would gain is temporary - if the ter'ists, pedophiles, Holocaust deniers, or pirates are using Tor, and we shut it down, they'll just switch to something else.
I will admit I haven't tried the math involved, but I can't think of a case where multiple orbits could produce the same curve at the same speed. Considering the one-dimensional case, higher orbits would appear slower, and elliptical orbits would appear faster around the perigee and slower around the apogee. When you're not in the orbital plane, I expect the apparent curvature would further help to fix the altitude.
Anyway, I can see how this would get expensive (cameras, CPU time), but I really don't think it's that impractical. However, doing it visually has other advantages over radar. For one, it's passive, so you can't detect it. Also, I suspect it would be easier to design a satellite to not reflect certain bands of radar back towards Earth, than to not reflect sunlight.
Yes, I have gone out and viewed the satellites going past. Living near a city, though, I haven't been able to see much more than Iridium flares and the ISS, though. So I guess the main problem would be getting enough good cameras.
You can infer time by carefully recording the times the images were taken. The exposures would ideally be short enough that a streak would span several images - then each endpoint gives you a coordinate in time and angular space, and you can easily infer the direction. You know the satellite's motion is inertial, so you should be able to figure the orbit. (You'd also need to throw away data that isn't plausible for an orbit, which you'd get plenty of from airplanes.)
I only said cover the horizon because, looking at data from heavens-above, it seems like it's more likely for the satellites to be visible there, and near dawn and dusk. You could cover a bigger area if you wanted.
Admittedly, you probably wouldn't get the best quality data. But it should be good enough for you to guess at the next visible pass, especially if you have multiple sites. (Keep in mind this is the kind of thing you could setup in a backyard in Nevada without anyone noticing.) And the end goal isn't to rendezvous with it or shoot it down, it's to know when it's visible so you can hide your doomsday devices.
The thing is, issues like this aren't the actual reason they're not honoring the warranty. They're doing it because they think it benefits them to make any excuse possible so they don't have to fix it. And it does, in the short term, though I suspect it isn't worth the lost goodwill. There aren't that many Linux users, so you aren't saving much money by screwing them. But they are a well-connected, vocal minority, as this article being on the front page shows.
Wow, that's horrible. Not just dialup users, but I suspect all but the most hopeless MySpace users would realize no content could be worth putting up with such a horrible website. No copy-n-paste, can't select text for something to do while reading, etc...
That reminds me: I've noticed some websites are getting around the popup blocker by launching windows when I click on the text. That's not cool. Maybe we should design the blocker to deny by default, and try to identify legit reasons (e.g. non-dragging click on image or underlined text) to open new windows, instead of just blocking the most common abuses.
Whether the medium is push or pull is irrelevant, so as far as ad-blocking goes, there's no difference between TV and the Web.
Basically: ad blocking is not illegal, because you haven't signed anything saying you'll view the ads. It so happens that enough people do to make advertising profitable, but this is a happy accident, not some corporate right.
You could say there's an implied contract that you'll view the ads, and thus blocking them is somehow wrong. Even if that's true, though, the implied contract is broken if the ads get too annoying.
Well, you can count on luck if you're constantly vigilant. Point a bunch of digital cameras at the sky, taking long-exposure images during dusk and dawn. Enough cameras to cover the horizon. Control them with a computer. Then you just need an automated system to pick out streaks with the right curvature, compute their orbits, and correlate them against your database of known targets. If you find one you haven't seen before, you can probably extract enough information to find it on its next pass and take more precise measurements. Leave this system on for a few months and you're bound to find quite a few interesting objects. I'd say it would take a few grad students a few months, and say $15000 in equipment, to set this up.
I'm not an expert, but... changing the orbit of satellites is hard. I could maybe see changing them by a few degrees to get better coverage of some area, weeks before we thought we would need it. But it's not like someone says, "Hey look, I see some terrorist activity, divert 3 more spy satellites to the area immediately!".
Check your math, I get 800 MB.
Everyone please post whether your pets are okay too. With enough anecdotes, we'll have hard data!
According to my back-of-the-envelope calculation (ratings info from Wikipedia), they get 80 cents to show you 20 minutes of ads. So if they get more than half of that $1.99, selling you an ad-free version is quite worth their while. (And in fact, big surprise, we're the ones getting screwed.)
That argument applies to any factor contributing to an unsafe working environment. Should we therefore have no regulation at all?
Granted it's unclear whether it's actually unsafe. Just sayin'.
Suppose the Republicans and Democrats became unbalanced enough that you could be reasonably sure which party would win the presidency. Are you then throwing away your vote if you vote on the probable loser? Would you really prefer a one-party system, the logical consequence of never "throwing away" your vote?
You won't get a cookie if you happened to vote for the winner. You won't get more representation, your vote isn't somehow worth more. To me, voting on someone you don't think is the best candidate, independently of his chances, is actually throwing away your vote - you forfeited your chance to mold the country to your ideals, and instead just pushed it a little farther towards wherever it's going anyway.
I definitely agree that mid-term elections are important too, though.
And which party is that?
I'd be really interested to hear of a single US senator or congressman who has their own opinion on copyright. Instead, we have two parties full of people who don't even bother to think about anything that's not in CNN's top five list of things we should fear, and for everything else, trust whoever gives them the most money.
Unfortunately, even if there were such politicians, the chances are minimal that I'd live in the right place to vote for them. Our democracy is useless for small yet non-geographical issues. Sigh.
Yes, if their beliefs involve voting as the church does for fear of divine retribution. That's why we have the separation of church and state.
However, this is more like a lot of people that don't even live in the community voting on for an ordinance that will hurt the community, but will benefit the surrounding areas. Do these Microsoft partner companies have any *technical* interest in the standard?
It's also worth mentioning that sales tax is applied by the state, and if you order stuff from out of state, you typically don't have to pay tax at all. (Though in some states you're supposed to report that stuff on your income tax return.)
So how do I ask the owner? There isn't any good way, certainly none that can be automated. Well, other than asking his router, that is.
Hooking up to someone else's cordless phone base station currently requires breaking some sort of security. And even before it did, there was a reasonable expectation that people wouldn't do that. Mostly because nobody walked around with devices specifically designed to, as they do with WiFi.
Btw, how is it not like running a webserver? Just saying it's not doesn't make that true. The only differences are the medium (Internet rather than radio), the information offered (Slashdot rather than the Internet), and the protocol (HTTP rather than 802.11g). In both cases, you're "stealing" bandwidth from the owner, and in both cases, it's OK, because a computer program gave you permission on the owner's behalf.
I mostly agree with the sibling AC who contested those points, but I just want to add:
If an unsecured wireless network means "don't use", then how would you even make a wireless network saying "use me"? I can think of putting something to that effect in the SSID, or using a meatspace sign. Both of these have the huge disadvantage that they can't be automated. Suppose I want my device to always be connected to the internet when there's a connection it has permission to use. Right now, I can just check the box that says "connect to unsecured networks". But if we assume unsecured means forbidden, it's pretty much impossible.