Wireless Internet access requires a wireless-enabled computer, a base station or other access point and Internet access (fees may apply). Some ISPs are not currently compatible with AirPort Express.
Am I supposed to parse this as:
"Wireless Internet access requires (a wireless-enabled computer, (a base station or other access point) and Internet access)"
Or:
"Wireless Internet access requires ((a wireless-enabled computer, a base station or other access point) and Internet access)"
The former implies that I would need an additional access point, whereas the latter does not.
For home and company use, how will they charge it?
From the article:
The ministry plans to collect fees from users of information appliances when they purchase these products, according to the sources.
So, its a per-device tax. Still a bad idea, and not very fair, perhaps, since some people will use the devices more than others (and in more crowded places), but this is a whole lot better than, say, per-minute useage charges.
The FCC acts as referee in the unlicensed space as well - just because there aren't licenses doesn't mean there aren't rules (but that doesn't mean taxing ISM band radios is a good idea - I doubt they spend much of their time tracking down malfunctioning 802.11 cards, and it would be kind of dumb to tax microwaves because they emit rf energy in the same band).
This is very cool to have an rts engine available to anyone who wants to add to it. It seems odd that there aren't more high quality, successful open source games (it seems like every computer nerd who ever lived dreams of someday writing a computer game and/or graphics engine). Maybe everyone tries to start from scratch and discovers its too much work.
Stratagus looks like it could be a cool platform for testing computer AI. Pitting one AI player against another could be more fun than playing the game manually, from the standpoint of the developers. Maybe they should have a contest to define the best AI player at some point, like this year's ICFP contest.
One of the primary functions of the big music labels is to function as a filter between musicians and listeners, so that listeners can have at least some basic expectation of quality when they buy a CD. Though paying twenty bucks for a CD doesn't guarantee high quality, it at least usually guarantees that some people will at least consider it pretty good.
This function could be automated by a recommender system (like movielens does for movies). Does anyone know of a good site for public domain / creative commons music recommendations? My past experience with PD music is that what I downloaded wasn't very good, but that may be because I wasn't downloading the right music. Or, for that matter, does anyone have recommendations for particular bands or songs that are freely available?
I assume you mean the adobe plugin. The project I linked to, on closer inspection, isn't actually a plugin - its built right into mozilla, but isn't enabled by default, since it lacks support for some of the necessary features.
I agree. I don't see why my everything-including-the-kitchen-sink install of Fedora Core 2 doesn't have an SVG viewer installed by default for Mozilla, even though one seems to exist. Is this just a fedora thing, or do all distributions not include an SVG viewer? Is there some fundamental reason for this (existing viewers are unstable, patent issues), or is it just that not enough users are clammoring for it? It seems like a major distribution could give SVG adoption a much needed boost by including it.
What's so insightful about the post above? It's just somebody's pessimistic comments about what he thinks might be true. Now post me some links of other providers who do the same thing or proof Verizon has this in mind, and I might think otherwise...
There's another single sign-in solution called public key cryptography. I'm a little confused as to what problem passport and liberty alliance are trying to solve that wasn't solved 20 years ago by diffie, hellman, rivest, shamir, and addleman. Perhaps someone can enlighten me. With PK, you can authenticate yourself to anyone without revealing your secret key.
Is passport/liberty alliance a solution to the public key distribution problem? Is it a hack to support PK-like authentication without requiring client browser modifications?
Imagine if you obtained a 50 year lease, and then at the end of those 50 years, the owner wanted the property back. Would you moan to the government about extending your term unilaterally, with no other compensation to the actual owner?
If there was good odds the government would side with me, sure, why not?
If you use a spam filter, you sould not have to worry about it.
Even better might be to interpret all mail sent to the catch-all account as spam, and use it to train the filter for real accounts (though there might be issues with legitimate senders mis-typing account names).
I'm anxious to hear what antennas actually matter.
Since the plane is mobile, a fixed directional antenna won't help much (though one that directed most energy upward from the ground station and one that pointed generally down from the plane would be better than an isotropic radiator). A moving antenna that tracks the aircraft's transponder or an APRS device might be reasonable, but difficult to build. What might work better is to use a 200 mw card (like one from zcomax or senao - most cards are about 35mw to allow greater spacial reuse). Or you could use an external 1 watt amplifier.
I'm more interested in the routing protocols for connection handoffs between base stations. AODV and DSR were shown experimentally to handle extremely high mobility of large numbers of nodes.
1) In some cases, you're right. If country A won't trade with country B, that's just too bad for country A. If country B is interfering with country C's ability to trade with country A, then country A has a legitimate grievance against country B.
2) You'd better be darned sure that a country is planning to attack. Attacking iraq solely because they might have WMD is not justifiable (the United States has WMD, so anyone else could use that as a justification to attack us), though taken with all the other things Iraq has done, the invasion was much more justifiable (though I don't really fault anyone who thinks it wasn't sufficiently justifiable to go to war).
3)I agree with you there, an attack against a subset of a country's population should be regarded in much the same way as if they had attacked another sovereign nation. Going to war over human rights issues of another country doesn't happen very often, though.
I'm not saying Japan was in the right in WWII. I'm saying that claiming Japan was in the wrong solely because they were the aggressor is overly simplistic.
Fair enough. The world is much more complicated than I can understand, but the attack on Pearl Harbor prevents me from feeling particularly sorry for what happened to them at the end of the war. (I would have liked there to have been fewer civilian casualties, but sometimes it isn't possible to stop bad people from doing bad things without significant collateral damage.)
Which would make the US the bad guys in the Iraq war, and thus deserving of a nuke or two in some heavily populated cities? Now there are a tonne of problems with "pre-emptive strikes" but saying "whoever attacked first is necessarily wrong" is just stupid.
Why is that stupid? Remember, Iraq became the aggressor nation when they invaded Kuwait. Any country that says to itself "I want what they have because I don't have it, and I'm going to kill people to get it" is evil. That war never really ended, it was just in a state of extended cease-fire. Iraq didn't want to abide the terms of the cease fire, so the cease fire ended. (And no, I don't accept the notion that Bush attacked Iraq to take their oil. Unfortunately, he used a pre-emptive justification of the war ("We need to invade before Iraq uses their WMD") rather than stick with the less persuasive arguments for the war ("Iraq is violating the terms of their cease-fire agreement, and we can't verify that the don't have WMD."))
I stay my words, the Japanese did only target military targets in Pearl Harbour (... and this was the main reason for the US to fight Japan and anything else was of no interest to the US for many years!)
Wheras the US aimed (knowingly and intended) at civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
How is killing military personnel of an (at that time) peaceful country somehow morally more acceptable than killing civilians?
-jim
Re:You just happen to be on the side that won
on
Atomic Veterans Speak Out
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You just happen to be on the side that happened to win. You can be damn sure that if the allies had lost, there'd be plenty of American (and allied) war criminals to prosecute.
Remember, the Japanese attacked us. That made them the bad guys that time around. We did bad things too, but at least we weren't trying to rule the world.
How is nuking a civilian city not a war crime?
Situational ethics. Fewer people died that way than if we'd used conventional weapons. It sucks, but it sucks the least of several possible options. That's how people make decisions during wars.
My point is, every human being to ever walk this earth is a hypocrite.
How then shall we compare and evaluate the behaviors of different countries during wartime? Being cynical just obscures the issue. Saying "everyone's a hypocrite" is like giving up.
You may think you are doing a good thing but companies which can afford to buy application software would buy software as a matter of regular business and treat it as a business expense.
If you create Application software which replaces software produced by smaller companies as closed source, you eliminate the following jobs: programmer, various support staff at the company, executives, advertising jobs, sales clerks, delivery/shipping jobs as well as all of the trickle down jobs in the community.
Open source software reduces the amount of duplicate work solving the same problem over and over again. This is good for society because it lets developers get on with creating something new
Most single parent families cannot afford any kind of computer so the most vulnerable in society will not gain any benefit from your largess but only the rich. Then there are the street people.
This may have been true about ten years ago when a mediocre computer was $2000, but its not really true anymore. Anyone who wants a computer can easily get one these days (unless maybe in the third world). If you can't afford a new one, find someone who wants to get rid of an old one. Anyways, a large part (sometimes the majority if you build it yourself) of the price of a computer is software, so your argument that free software doesn't help poor people is flawed.
There is a bigger issue here: how does society function when there's not enough useful work to go around? I don't think abandoning OSS is the solution, though.
but open source software loses more often backwards compatibility than windows is. From libpng to gtk to the kernel, it is just not guaranteed that next month's version will be 100% compatible with the source you wrote 6 months or 3 months ago.
While in some cases true, this is not always a bad thing. Interface changes allow progress. Linux would not be anwhere near where it is today if developers were afraid of breaking interfaces.
For users this is bad, because MOST linux users do use the source to install apps.
These days, I suspect the opposite: most users install programs from binary packages not source. Most compatibility problems are binary compatibility -- a simple recompile would solve the problem. This is why we have distributions do the work of configuring packages for us. Changes that break binary compatibility, though, are usually restricted to major releases. For instance, as far as I know, the policy for the Linux kernel is to not change any binary interfaces between user space and kernel space between minor releases (except maybe adding new system calls or proc files, which won't affect existing applications). Some parts of this interface are not likely to ever change (such as fork, open, write, select, kill, etc...). Changing the binary interface within the kernel is fine, because it won't break anything outside the kernel (though it is a nuisance for the people developing the Nvidia drivers). Red hat has used a similar policy: binary compatibility is maintained between RH 8.0, 8.1, and 8.2, but RH 9.0 is not binary compatible with 8.0. Recompiling code can be annoying, but I'd rather have a system that improves significantly with each release.
Regarding jobs getting lost, I also agree. The problem is NOT as big as Gates says atm, but if OSS becomes much more popular in the future, it will be a problem for software engineers. You devalue your own profession.
If you see computers as a means of generating revenue, OSS is a bad thing. If you see computers as a tool to solve problems, OSS is a good thing. Jobs may be lost in some cases, but society will be better off because people can use the full capability of their computers, and effort will not be wasted re-solving the same problem over and over again. Whether efficient problem solving is good for the economy is a matter of debate, though.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
Am I supposed to parse this as:
"Wireless Internet access requires (a wireless-enabled computer, (a base station or other access point) and Internet access)"
Or:
"Wireless Internet access requires ((a wireless-enabled computer, a base station or other access point) and Internet access)"
The former implies that I would need an additional access point, whereas the latter does not.
-jim
From the article:
So, its a per-device tax. Still a bad idea, and not very fair, perhaps, since some people will use the devices more than others (and in more crowded places), but this is a whole lot better than, say, per-minute useage charges.
-jim
The FCC acts as referee in the unlicensed space as well - just because there aren't licenses doesn't mean there aren't rules (but that doesn't mean taxing ISM band radios is a good idea - I doubt they spend much of their time tracking down malfunctioning 802.11 cards, and it would be kind of dumb to tax microwaves because they emit rf energy in the same band).
-jim
I just tried it out. You're right, it is worth the download. They even have rpms.
-jim
This is very cool to have an rts engine available to anyone who wants to add to it. It seems odd that there aren't more high quality, successful open source games (it seems like every computer nerd who ever lived dreams of someday writing a computer game and/or graphics engine). Maybe everyone tries to start from scratch and discovers its too much work.
Stratagus looks like it could be a cool platform for testing computer AI. Pitting one AI player against another could be more fun than playing the game manually, from the standpoint of the developers. Maybe they should have a contest to define the best AI player at some point, like this year's ICFP contest.
-jim
And in the educational world, its sometimes diffictult to convince those writing the budgets that computers are a recurring expense.
Anyone know what the average lifespan for a computer is in home, business, and educational settings?
-jim
One of the primary functions of the big music labels is to function as a filter between musicians and listeners, so that listeners can have at least some basic expectation of quality when they buy a CD. Though paying twenty bucks for a CD doesn't guarantee high quality, it at least usually guarantees that some people will at least consider it pretty good.
This function could be automated by a recommender system (like movielens does for movies). Does anyone know of a good site for public domain / creative commons music recommendations? My past experience with PD music is that what I downloaded wasn't very good, but that may be because I wasn't downloading the right music. Or, for that matter, does anyone have recommendations for particular bands or songs that are freely available?
-jim
-jim
I assume you mean the adobe plugin. The project I linked to, on closer inspection, isn't actually a plugin - its built right into mozilla, but isn't enabled by default, since it lacks support for some of the necessary features.
-jim
I agree. I don't see why my everything-including-the-kitchen-sink install of Fedora Core 2 doesn't have an SVG viewer installed by default for Mozilla, even though one seems to exist. Is this just a fedora thing, or do all distributions not include an SVG viewer? Is there some fundamental reason for this (existing viewers are unstable, patent issues), or is it just that not enough users are clammoring for it? It seems like a major distribution could give SVG adoption a much needed boost by including it.
-jim
Have you ever read Verison's terms of service?
Translation: We don't believe in the end-to-end nature of the Internet. Consume all you want, but don't even think about producing something!
This probably doesn't matter to most people, but it irks me when companies try to turn the Internet into interactive television.
-jim
But can you run a server or share with your neighbors?
-jim
There's another single sign-in solution called public key cryptography. I'm a little confused as to what problem passport and liberty alliance are trying to solve that wasn't solved 20 years ago by diffie, hellman, rivest, shamir, and addleman. Perhaps someone can enlighten me. With PK, you can authenticate yourself to anyone without revealing your secret key.
Is passport/liberty alliance a solution to the public key distribution problem? Is it a hack to support PK-like authentication without requiring client browser modifications?
-jim
If there was good odds the government would side with me, sure, why not?
-jim
Even better might be to interpret all mail sent to the catch-all account as spam, and use it to train the filter for real accounts (though there might be issues with legitimate senders mis-typing account names).
-jim
Since the plane is mobile, a fixed directional antenna won't help much (though one that directed most energy upward from the ground station and one that pointed generally down from the plane would be better than an isotropic radiator). A moving antenna that tracks the aircraft's transponder or an APRS device might be reasonable, but difficult to build. What might work better is to use a 200 mw card (like one from zcomax or senao - most cards are about 35mw to allow greater spacial reuse). Or you could use an external 1 watt amplifier.
I'm more interested in the routing protocols for connection handoffs between base stations. AODV and DSR were shown experimentally to handle extremely high mobility of large numbers of nodes.
-jim
I for one welcome our martian ammonia-spewing window-cleaning microbial overlords.
1) In some cases, you're right. If country A won't trade with country B, that's just too bad for country A. If country B is interfering with country C's ability to trade with country A, then country A has a legitimate grievance against country B.
2) You'd better be darned sure that a country is planning to attack. Attacking iraq solely because they might have WMD is not justifiable (the United States has WMD, so anyone else could use that as a justification to attack us), though taken with all the other things Iraq has done, the invasion was much more justifiable (though I don't really fault anyone who thinks it wasn't sufficiently justifiable to go to war).
3)I agree with you there, an attack against a subset of a country's population should be regarded in much the same way as if they had attacked another sovereign nation. Going to war over human rights issues of another country doesn't happen very often, though.
Fair enough. The world is much more complicated than I can understand, but the attack on Pearl Harbor prevents me from feeling particularly sorry for what happened to them at the end of the war. (I would have liked there to have been fewer civilian casualties, but sometimes it isn't possible to stop bad people from doing bad things without significant collateral damage.)
-jim
IIRC a stationary electrical field doesn't generate a magnetic field. Therefore, I propose that negative people should be sent into low earth orbit.
-jim
Why is that stupid? Remember, Iraq became the aggressor nation when they invaded Kuwait. Any country that says to itself "I want what they have because I don't have it, and I'm going to kill people to get it" is evil. That war never really ended, it was just in a state of extended cease-fire. Iraq didn't want to abide the terms of the cease fire, so the cease fire ended. (And no, I don't accept the notion that Bush attacked Iraq to take their oil. Unfortunately, he used a pre-emptive justification of the war ("We need to invade before Iraq uses their WMD") rather than stick with the less persuasive arguments for the war ("Iraq is violating the terms of their cease-fire agreement, and we can't verify that the don't have WMD."))
-jim
How is killing military personnel of an (at that time) peaceful country somehow morally more acceptable than killing civilians?
-jim
Remember, the Japanese attacked us. That made them the bad guys that time around. We did bad things too, but at least we weren't trying to rule the world.
Situational ethics. Fewer people died that way than if we'd used conventional weapons. It sucks, but it sucks the least of several possible options. That's how people make decisions during wars.
How then shall we compare and evaluate the behaviors of different countries during wartime? Being cynical just obscures the issue. Saying "everyone's a hypocrite" is like giving up.
-jim
Open source software reduces the amount of duplicate work solving the same problem over and over again. This is good for society because it lets developers get on with creating something new
This may have been true about ten years ago when a mediocre computer was $2000, but its not really true anymore. Anyone who wants a computer can easily get one these days (unless maybe in the third world). If you can't afford a new one, find someone who wants to get rid of an old one. Anyways, a large part (sometimes the majority if you build it yourself) of the price of a computer is software, so your argument that free software doesn't help poor people is flawed.
There is a bigger issue here: how does society function when there's not enough useful work to go around? I don't think abandoning OSS is the solution, though.
-jim
Here is a slashdot anomaly: the parent post would have more credibility had it been posted as anonymous coward.
-jim
While in some cases true, this is not always a bad thing. Interface changes allow progress. Linux would not be anwhere near where it is today if developers were afraid of breaking interfaces.
These days, I suspect the opposite: most users install programs from binary packages not source. Most compatibility problems are binary compatibility -- a simple recompile would solve the problem. This is why we have distributions do the work of configuring packages for us. Changes that break binary compatibility, though, are usually restricted to major releases. For instance, as far as I know, the policy for the Linux kernel is to not change any binary interfaces between user space and kernel space between minor releases (except maybe adding new system calls or proc files, which won't affect existing applications). Some parts of this interface are not likely to ever change (such as fork, open, write, select, kill, etc...). Changing the binary interface within the kernel is fine, because it won't break anything outside the kernel (though it is a nuisance for the people developing the Nvidia drivers). Red hat has used a similar policy: binary compatibility is maintained between RH 8.0, 8.1, and 8.2, but RH 9.0 is not binary compatible with 8.0. Recompiling code can be annoying, but I'd rather have a system that improves significantly with each release.
If you see computers as a means of generating revenue, OSS is a bad thing. If you see computers as a tool to solve problems, OSS is a good thing. Jobs may be lost in some cases, but society will be better off because people can use the full capability of their computers, and effort will not be wasted re-solving the same problem over and over again. Whether efficient problem solving is good for the economy is a matter of debate, though.
-jim