If regulators have failed to enforce existing regulations, what makes anyone think they will enforce any new regulations?
The regulators were tasked to check that the companies followed the procedures for checking their own operations. This kind of twice-removed oversight is becoming increasingly common in lots of places, because it saves money for the government (popular with voters) as well as being popular in the private sector (for obvious reasons).
It works great as long as companies are overall honest and all their problems are caused by simple negligence. It doesn't work so well in the face of outright fraud.
Never the less he and he alone maintains the reference kernel source. That's a potential problem. Or- explain to me why it isn't.
It is only the reference insofar that distributions tend to work off of it. It would be just as easy for them technically to use a random other git tree as the reference, if they chose to do so. However, Linus is doing such a good job these days that non-enterprise distributions just stick with his sources + a limited set of patches. If he stops doing a good job (like in the hit-by-bus scenario which seems so popular), there are several well-maintained trees to pick from, and Linux would only be a little worse off.
The most important advantage of Linus is that his decisions are almost universally respected. It would be difficult even for David Miller and Alan Cox to get the same universal buy-in, and Andrew Morton is possibly too nice for the job.
You need to release your patches that make the Executable run the library (include functions and other changes to Wordpress), but the library should be off limits, it's not derived, it's used.
Good luck with that interpretation, but the GPL defines it the other way. GPL'd software on top of a proprietary system is only possible because of a special exception for libraries which are shipped with the system or the compiler. Obviously writing a piece of GPL software which uses a particular library can't force the library to be GPL, it simply makes it impossible to legally redistribute the software.
You can get away with a lot if you don't accept the GPL in the first place and simply deal with standard copyright rules. However, if you e.g. distribute WordPress, you must have accepted the GPL (or the author can sue you for distributing without a license). By accepting the GPL, you have to accept its terms even if those terms go further than copyright itself requires. That is, if a license-to-distribute for a particular program demands that the author must never, ever distribute any Ubuntu DVD's to anyone, then those are the rules if you ever distribute that particular program.
In other words, it depends a lot whether the non-GPL theme developers ever distributed Wordpress to anyone. If they didn't, they can argue that their themes are not derivatives according to copyright law, and they may have a chance. If they did, they have accepted the GPL's interpretation, and that will be difficult to get around in court.
nVidia is much the same: As long as they don't themselves distribute Linux they're probably reasonably safe. Third party vendors who e.g. preinstall the nVidia drivers when they sell a Linux laptop are much more likely to be in breach of the GPL. However, the Linux kernel developers basically never sue anyone, so in that way it doesn't really matter which license the kernel has.
(e.g. if very complicated NTFS-style permissions were implemented)
They are, it's just that nobody uses them. Well except me. Linux with ext3 has had them for ages, and e.g. HP-UX had them in '94 -- probably earlier, but that's when I used them for the first time.
ls doesn't do much useful with them on Linux though. You need getfacl/setfacl for that.
Your existing backups work for wind power too. Also, Denmark is tiny so production will naturally be somewhat similar at all wind farms. Even so, it is rarely zero.
Add Germany and Great Britain to the equation and you'll never see zero production.
You have exactly the same issues with other types of power plants. They don't run 100% all the time, they need maintenance and they break down.
Wind turbines don't all stop at the same time if they're decently distributed. You don't need storage to fix that, you just need a sufficient variety of power sources and a reasonable over-capacity so that the likelihood of everything failing at once is sufficiently low. Exactly the same as the existing system which is actually rather fragile. Unscheduled maintenance on a nuclear block is bad news, and even scheduled maintenance can cause problems, simply because they are so large.
Of course it helps to have practically unlimited storage right next door in the form of hydro power, like Denmark has in Norway and Sweden. The best form of energy storage is to simply let less water run through a turbine -- it's the only solution which gets close to 100% efficiency. And yes, Denmark pays for that in the form of exporting cheap and importing expensive, but it helps that we export in winter when electricity is more expensive and import in summer when dams are overflowing.
Modern wind turbines don't run in phase with the grid, they convert with power electronics. This means that they are a great stabilizing factor on the grid in the short term, especially if the load needs power factor correction.
Older wind turbines were indeed troublesome for the grid because it is difficult to keep something powered by the wind rotating at a completely steady speed. Luckily this is no longer necessary.
Anyway, two coal fired blocks are supposed to be closed in Denmark this year according to this article. They have not been replaced by new coal-fired capacity (and that wouldn't make sense anyway, as they are fairly modern and quite efficient).
Denmark is a very small country with lots of wind. I'd guess that they are doing this on purpose, simply producing power as an export product (probably a bit like Oregon in this story).
Denmark happens to be situated right next to a vast amount of hydro power, in Norway and Sweden. Hydro power used to be almost enough for those two countries, but these days it isn't. Therefore they like getting help in the form of (fairly) cheap overflow wind power, especially in winter when there is a lot of it and reservoirs are running low.
You have exactly the same problem with nuclear. At night you throw away power. So far wind turbines are only throwing away less than 1% of the power they produce.
The solution to large scale wind power generation is to first and foremost accept a bit of power wasted. After that there are a lot of options for reducing the waste: HVDC lines, hydro power (luckily wind power generates the most in winter when hydro power is at risk of running dry), load shifting... If waste becomes unacceptably high, those solutions become comparably more attractive.
So the wind turbines had to reduce production for a few hours. Is it really worth doing massive build-outs to fix that? It's sad to see energy go to waste, but on the other hand you can go outside and watch all the energy going to waste because there isn't a wind turbine to catch it in the first place!
As long we're wasting less than 10% of power (and right now we're below 1% at least in wind-farm-filled Denmark) I don't see the problem. I bet planned and unplanned maintenance accounts for several percent anyway.
Most (even server) CPU's don't support more anyway. It isn't a hard limit like the 640k or 4GB limits though, the next version can support more while remaining binary compatible with user programs. Given that it's hardly a problem.
The median is the middle value. Of the values 1 1 1 1 2 3 3 4 5, the median is 2. I'm also somewhat confused whether you consider XP -> Vista to be 5 or 6 years. That doesn't affect the median, though. The mean is 2.3 years.
"My error-correction algorithm is better than the human brain's ability to grasp signal through noise."
Well, it is, and not by a small margin either. You'll notice how everything else which switches from analog to digital manages to provide better quality in less bandwidth. If the human brain can provide so many extra dB of SNR because of its superior error correction, why did anything go digital?
Have to disagree very strongly with this. I would like to be able to hear well, but if I can't hear well then I still want to be able to hear. Human brains are great at separating the signal from the noise whether it's in a crowd or on the radio. I don't see why we wouldn't take advantage of this.
You're using the human brain as an error correcting code. The benefit is just not there, you can do just as well by adding a few percent of ECC overhead, and then reception will be perfect in all the areas where it was lousy before. This is what pretty much all designers of digital signals prefer to do.
If you want to use the human brain, you have to ensure that a missed bit doesn't render a lot of data unintelligible. This limits which encodings you can use, generally forcing you to use simple almost uncompressed ones, which again means that reception is going to be worse.
Why? You've expanded only on the sound quality argument - could you name a combination which you believe exceeds the quality and graceful degradation properties of FM, along with an independent study supporting your assertion? Even Dolby, the Via subsidiary of which handles DRM licencing, sells it as "near-FM quality".
DRM+ will probably mostly use 50kHz channels which should offer about 300kbps bandwidth. The standard doesn't prohibit using more though, so you can go 100kHz and stream FLAC (although getting FLAC support into receivers might be a challenge, and FLAC is difficult for streaming anyway).
There is a risk that people will go 64 kbps MP3 or worse, but you can't blame the standard for that.
Degradation is fairly binary -- either you have reception or you don't. I consider that a feature.
Erm, up to 4 data streams per MUX, no? Or is only one audio stream supported?
Traditionally you'd only do one audio stream per MUX in DRM. BBC World Service DRM has this to say: " The main data channel can carry up to four simultaneous streams. This is not intended to provide a service multiplex such as DVB or DAB provides – the channel is not large enough for that."
But you, like other listeners, don't consider it worth the expense to move on from FM.
Right now my combined solution is OK. It isn't as convenient as everything in one box, just like adding a digital TV box isn't as convenient as having a TV with a digital tuner.
This is true if all your drives are sufficiently short and urban to give you very good mobile Internet reception (you're living somewhere very well connected if you're getting free and uninterrupted FM quality radio in your car!)
I can't really think of anywhere within a few hundred miles that I could go to which wouldn't have at least EDGE. The only problem is crossing into a different country where I'd be screwed over by roaming charges, but the FM network is fairly useless there too because I don't understand the language well enough to enjoy their stations.
Tedious in what sense? "This might have take up a few man-days of mathematicians' and programmers' time every few years" tedious? The complexities of DAB are, in terms of mathematical problems raised, far more "tedious".
Tedious enough that it has resulted in days of wasted effort in parliament, and many man-years wasted by various committees.
If you honestly believe that sound quality, transmitter cost, receiver cost, upgrade timeframes, power requirements, longevity, robustness and repairability are together less important than some perceived demand for as many radio stations as possible, you should probably be campaigning for PSK31.
Of those, you only have a point for receiver cost and network effects ("upgrade timeframes" and "longevity"). The rest are non-issues, and the sound quality of a decent digital network (not DAB, again) is better than FM.
Yes, I want the opportunity to rent space from a reseller multiplex rather than setting up my own cheap equipment.
Notice how I said DRM+? DRM+ lets you run a station exactly the same way you run an FM station today. Your own equipment, your own (much smaller) frequency allocation, everything is yours.
I'm sorry you live in a backwards area. More Internet radio than I can handle is available for $10/month here, and that gives me mobile Internet access at the same time. The in-car system can use a data connection for other interesting things too. TomTom is already using it for live traffic information.
It may be 10 years before there are more people with (close to unlimited) mobile Internet access than people with FM radios, but I can't imagine it will take much longer than that.
The only things that would make FM obsolete would be if DAB had better range, lower costs, significantly better audio quality, or some other positive quality.
Replace the word DAB with DVB-T or DRM+, and you have a winner. DAB doesn't offer much over FM and it is in some ways worse, but that is because DAB is a crap standard, not because there's anything wrong with digital transmissions.
Assuming ubiquity of the Internet - driven a car recently?
Yes, when I listen to the radio in the car it is about 50% Internet and 50% FM. The FM is simply because the user interface is a bit easier right now on my 11 year old car stereo, so if a program I like happens to be on I just stick with FM. If I spent the money on a car stereo which could receive Internet radio itself it would be 100% Internet.
It is not so good for live broadcasts, but anything that can live with a 30 second delay works fine. A 30 second buffer is also plenty to cover up any gaps in coverage.
So horrendous that FM pirate stations exist all over London and even the government recognises that the FM spectrum would be useful to legitimate local stations once - they hope - the big boys have moved off it.
FM is ok for local stations. It sucks for national networks; frequency planning is tedious and there is never enough space. DRM+ is even better for local stations though.
If it were obsolete people would be eagerly looking to replace their FM receivers.
It's simply hanging on because of network effects. Until recently there was no competition at all. If we don't switch to digital radio, the Internet will kill off FM, it will just take a bit longer.
The really big question is whether radio can sustain the cost of a separate network at all. Hopefully it'll just move to DVB, which ought to keep operating costs low. Or DRM+ where you don't need a network, so each local station can pay its own costs.
Why the obsession with quantity over quality? Five hundred low bitrate stations pumping out shit is a horrible waste of precious bandwidth.
Five or six stations just isn't enough anymore. If we don't increase the number of stations, listeners will switch to the Internet and then the FM network will be too expensive to run. The power requirements alone are horrendous.
Degrading and fixability: And when this happens to an analogue radio, it may be fixable - meanwhile, operation tends to degrade rather than die completely. You have very little hope fixing DAB. This becomes significant when considering disaster broadcasts (and two way transmission, of course). People today assume there'll be roses and sweetness across the world for until the end of time. I'm not sure why. Maybe they're young, or maybe they're idiots. A system which doesn't require a chip fab to replace is essential.
Our modern power distribution network is dependent on integrated electronics, and our current FM network depends on that... Either way that's a lost cause, in 30 years only radio amateurs will use analog, and switching the FM network off won't annoy the radio amateurs.
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If regulators have failed to enforce existing regulations, what makes anyone think they will enforce any new regulations?
The regulators were tasked to check that the companies followed the procedures for checking their own operations. This kind of twice-removed oversight is becoming increasingly common in lots of places, because it saves money for the government (popular with voters) as well as being popular in the private sector (for obvious reasons).
It works great as long as companies are overall honest and all their problems are caused by simple negligence. It doesn't work so well in the face of outright fraud.
Never the less he and he alone maintains the reference kernel source. That's a potential problem. Or- explain to me why it isn't.
It is only the reference insofar that distributions tend to work off of it. It would be just as easy for them technically to use a random other git tree as the reference, if they chose to do so. However, Linus is doing such a good job these days that non-enterprise distributions just stick with his sources + a limited set of patches. If he stops doing a good job (like in the hit-by-bus scenario which seems so popular), there are several well-maintained trees to pick from, and Linux would only be a little worse off.
The most important advantage of Linus is that his decisions are almost universally respected. It would be difficult even for David Miller and Alan Cox to get the same universal buy-in, and Andrew Morton is possibly too nice for the job.
You need to release your patches that make the Executable run the library (include functions and other changes to Wordpress), but the library should be off limits, it's not derived, it's used.
Good luck with that interpretation, but the GPL defines it the other way. GPL'd software on top of a proprietary system is only possible because of a special exception for libraries which are shipped with the system or the compiler. Obviously writing a piece of GPL software which uses a particular library can't force the library to be GPL, it simply makes it impossible to legally redistribute the software.
Then all WP plugins will automagically and retroactively become derived works of your program in addition to WordPress itself.
That isn't how copyright law works. Copyright cares about the history of how the particular bits came into existence.
You can get away with a lot if you don't accept the GPL in the first place and simply deal with standard copyright rules. However, if you e.g. distribute WordPress, you must have accepted the GPL (or the author can sue you for distributing without a license). By accepting the GPL, you have to accept its terms even if those terms go further than copyright itself requires. That is, if a license-to-distribute for a particular program demands that the author must never, ever distribute any Ubuntu DVD's to anyone, then those are the rules if you ever distribute that particular program.
In other words, it depends a lot whether the non-GPL theme developers ever distributed Wordpress to anyone. If they didn't, they can argue that their themes are not derivatives according to copyright law, and they may have a chance. If they did, they have accepted the GPL's interpretation, and that will be difficult to get around in court.
nVidia is much the same: As long as they don't themselves distribute Linux they're probably reasonably safe. Third party vendors who e.g. preinstall the nVidia drivers when they sell a Linux laptop are much more likely to be in breach of the GPL. However, the Linux kernel developers basically never sue anyone, so in that way it doesn't really matter which license the kernel has.
(e.g. if very complicated NTFS-style permissions were implemented)
They are, it's just that nobody uses them. Well except me. Linux with ext3 has had them for ages, and e.g. HP-UX had them in '94 -- probably earlier, but that's when I used them for the first time.
ls doesn't do much useful with them on Linux though. You need getfacl/setfacl for that.
Your existing backups work for wind power too. Also, Denmark is tiny so production will naturally be somewhat similar at all wind farms. Even so, it is rarely zero.
Add Germany and Great Britain to the equation and you'll never see zero production.
You have exactly the same issues with other types of power plants. They don't run 100% all the time, they need maintenance and they break down.
Wind turbines don't all stop at the same time if they're decently distributed. You don't need storage to fix that, you just need a sufficient variety of power sources and a reasonable over-capacity so that the likelihood of everything failing at once is sufficiently low. Exactly the same as the existing system which is actually rather fragile. Unscheduled maintenance on a nuclear block is bad news, and even scheduled maintenance can cause problems, simply because they are so large.
Of course it helps to have practically unlimited storage right next door in the form of hydro power, like Denmark has in Norway and Sweden. The best form of energy storage is to simply let less water run through a turbine -- it's the only solution which gets close to 100% efficiency. And yes, Denmark pays for that in the form of exporting cheap and importing expensive, but it helps that we export in winter when electricity is more expensive and import in summer when dams are overflowing.
Modern wind turbines don't run in phase with the grid, they convert with power electronics. This means that they are a great stabilizing factor on the grid in the short term, especially if the load needs power factor correction.
Older wind turbines were indeed troublesome for the grid because it is difficult to keep something powered by the wind rotating at a completely steady speed. Luckily this is no longer necessary.
Anyway, two coal fired blocks are supposed to be closed in Denmark this year according to this article. They have not been replaced by new coal-fired capacity (and that wouldn't make sense anyway, as they are fairly modern and quite efficient).
Denmark is a very small country with lots of wind. I'd guess that they are doing this on purpose, simply producing power as an export product (probably a bit like Oregon in this story).
Denmark happens to be situated right next to a vast amount of hydro power, in Norway and Sweden. Hydro power used to be almost enough for those two countries, but these days it isn't. Therefore they like getting help in the form of (fairly) cheap overflow wind power, especially in winter when there is a lot of it and reservoirs are running low.
You have exactly the same problem with nuclear. At night you throw away power. So far wind turbines are only throwing away less than 1% of the power they produce.
The solution to large scale wind power generation is to first and foremost accept a bit of power wasted. After that there are a lot of options for reducing the waste: HVDC lines, hydro power (luckily wind power generates the most in winter when hydro power is at risk of running dry), load shifting... If waste becomes unacceptably high, those solutions become comparably more attractive.
So the wind turbines had to reduce production for a few hours. Is it really worth doing massive build-outs to fix that? It's sad to see energy go to waste, but on the other hand you can go outside and watch all the energy going to waste because there isn't a wind turbine to catch it in the first place!
As long we're wasting less than 10% of power (and right now we're below 1% at least in wind-farm-filled Denmark) I don't see the problem. I bet planned and unplanned maintenance accounts for several percent anyway.
so if I make a porno with my gf for our own amusement, you're entitled to distribute it
In sane places there are non-copyright laws to deal with that. Hopefully there are in your jurisdiction as well.
Most (even server) CPU's don't support more anyway. It isn't a hard limit like the 640k or 4GB limits though, the next version can support more while remaining binary compatible with user programs. Given that it's hardly a problem.
The median is the middle value. Of the values 1 1 1 1 2 3 3 4 5, the median is 2. I'm also somewhat confused whether you consider XP -> Vista to be 5 or 6 years. That doesn't affect the median, though. The mean is 2.3 years.
"My error-correction algorithm is better than the human brain's ability to grasp signal through noise."
Well, it is, and not by a small margin either. You'll notice how everything else which switches from analog to digital manages to provide better quality in less bandwidth. If the human brain can provide so many extra dB of SNR because of its superior error correction, why did anything go digital?
Have to disagree very strongly with this. I would like to be able to hear well, but if I can't hear well then I still want to be able to hear. Human brains are great at separating the signal from the noise whether it's in a crowd or on the radio. I don't see why we wouldn't take advantage of this.
You're using the human brain as an error correcting code. The benefit is just not there, you can do just as well by adding a few percent of ECC overhead, and then reception will be perfect in all the areas where it was lousy before. This is what pretty much all designers of digital signals prefer to do.
If you want to use the human brain, you have to ensure that a missed bit doesn't render a lot of data unintelligible. This limits which encodings you can use, generally forcing you to use simple almost uncompressed ones, which again means that reception is going to be worse.
Sci fi is also still ridiculously expensive to make, except as animation.
Why? You've expanded only on the sound quality argument - could you name a combination which you believe exceeds the quality and graceful degradation properties of FM, along with an independent study supporting your assertion? Even Dolby, the Via subsidiary of which handles DRM licencing, sells it as "near-FM quality".
DRM+ will probably mostly use 50kHz channels which should offer about 300kbps bandwidth. The standard doesn't prohibit using more though, so you can go 100kHz and stream FLAC (although getting FLAC support into receivers might be a challenge, and FLAC is difficult for streaming anyway).
There is a risk that people will go 64 kbps MP3 or worse, but you can't blame the standard for that.
Degradation is fairly binary -- either you have reception or you don't. I consider that a feature.
Erm, up to 4 data streams per MUX, no? Or is only one audio stream supported?
Traditionally you'd only do one audio stream per MUX in DRM. BBC World Service DRM has this to say: " The main data channel can carry up to four simultaneous streams. This is not intended to provide a service multiplex such as DVB or DAB provides – the channel is not large enough for that."
But you, like other listeners, don't consider it worth the expense to move on from FM.
Right now my combined solution is OK. It isn't as convenient as everything in one box, just like adding a digital TV box isn't as convenient as having a TV with a digital tuner.
This is true if all your drives are sufficiently short and urban to give you very good mobile Internet reception (you're living somewhere very well connected if you're getting free and uninterrupted FM quality radio in your car!)
I can't really think of anywhere within a few hundred miles that I could go to which wouldn't have at least EDGE. The only problem is crossing into a different country where I'd be screwed over by roaming charges, but the FM network is fairly useless there too because I don't understand the language well enough to enjoy their stations.
Tedious in what sense? "This might have take up a few man-days of mathematicians' and programmers' time every few years" tedious? The complexities of DAB are, in terms of mathematical problems raised, far more "tedious".
Tedious enough that it has resulted in days of wasted effort in parliament, and many man-years wasted by various committees.
If you honestly believe that sound quality, transmitter cost, receiver cost, upgrade timeframes, power requirements, longevity, robustness and repairability are together less important than some perceived demand for as many radio stations as possible, you should probably be campaigning for PSK31.
Of those, you only have a point for receiver cost and network effects ("upgrade timeframes" and "longevity"). The rest are non-issues, and the sound quality of a decent digital network (not DAB, again) is better than FM.
Yes, I want the opportunity to rent space from a reseller multiplex rather than setting up my own cheap equipment.
Notice how I said DRM+? DRM+ lets you run a station exactly the same way you run an FM station today. Your own equipment, your own (much smaller) frequency allocation, everything is yours.
I'm sorry you live in a backwards area. More Internet radio than I can handle is available for $10/month here, and that gives me mobile Internet access at the same time. The in-car system can use a data connection for other interesting things too. TomTom is already using it for live traffic information.
It may be 10 years before there are more people with (close to unlimited) mobile Internet access than people with FM radios, but I can't imagine it will take much longer than that.
The only things that would make FM obsolete would be if DAB had better range, lower costs, significantly better audio quality, or some other positive quality.
Replace the word DAB with DVB-T or DRM+, and you have a winner. DAB doesn't offer much over FM and it is in some ways worse, but that is because DAB is a crap standard, not because there's anything wrong with digital transmissions.
Assuming ubiquity of the Internet - driven a car recently?
Yes, when I listen to the radio in the car it is about 50% Internet and 50% FM. The FM is simply because the user interface is a bit easier right now on my 11 year old car stereo, so if a program I like happens to be on I just stick with FM. If I spent the money on a car stereo which could receive Internet radio itself it would be 100% Internet.
It is not so good for live broadcasts, but anything that can live with a 30 second delay works fine. A 30 second buffer is also plenty to cover up any gaps in coverage.
So horrendous that FM pirate stations exist all over London and even the government recognises that the FM spectrum would be useful to legitimate local stations once - they hope - the big boys have moved off it.
FM is ok for local stations. It sucks for national networks; frequency planning is tedious and there is never enough space. DRM+ is even better for local stations though.
If it were obsolete people would be eagerly looking to replace their FM receivers.
It's simply hanging on because of network effects. Until recently there was no competition at all. If we don't switch to digital radio, the Internet will kill off FM, it will just take a bit longer.
The really big question is whether radio can sustain the cost of a separate network at all. Hopefully it'll just move to DVB, which ought to keep operating costs low. Or DRM+ where you don't need a network, so each local station can pay its own costs.
Why the obsession with quantity over quality? Five hundred low bitrate stations pumping out shit is a horrible waste of precious bandwidth.
Five or six stations just isn't enough anymore. If we don't increase the number of stations, listeners will switch to the Internet and then the FM network will be too expensive to run. The power requirements alone are horrendous.
Degrading and fixability: And when this happens to an analogue radio, it may be fixable - meanwhile, operation tends to degrade rather than die completely. You have very little hope fixing DAB. This becomes significant when considering disaster broadcasts (and two way transmission, of course). People today assume there'll be roses and sweetness across the world for until the end of time. I'm not sure why. Maybe they're young, or maybe they're idiots. A system which doesn't require a chip fab to replace is essential.
Our modern power distribution network is dependent on integrated electronics, and our current FM network depends on that... Either way that's a lost cause, in 30 years only radio amateurs will use analog, and switching the FM network off won't annoy the radio amateurs.