Granted the US market is very important, but RIM will have the global arena. the US just screws itself from not having Blackberrys.
Seems to be typical when it comes to things that have to do with cellular networks.. hugely popular in the USA, they just have to use a system different from what the rest of the world uses (ok, they are catching up now). Past experience of course tells us that that just results in a more expensive system that easily gets outdated and becomes a bother when travelling cross-border, but who cares.
20 years does not qualify as 'a few years' with the current pace of development of new technologies, it rather qualifies as more then long enough to make the invention outdated and irrelevant in many cases.
The basic idea behind patents is a good one I believe, the current implementation however is bad for a multitude of reasons, the one I just mentioned being only one of those reasons.
They won the patent, they can do with it what they want. So what if they didn't have the capital or knowhow to develop a nationwide wireless messaging network? How does this requirement protect "the little guy?" They won a patent for the technology and have a right to defend it.
The purpose of the patent system is to PROMOTE USEFULL INVENTIONS, not to protect the 'little guy'.
If this 'little guy' does a usefull invention, the patent system should help him protect it enough to be able to proffit from it of course, and it may even be fair to favor the 'little guy' over the big corporation in that, but this is all about the means, and not about the actual goal of the patent system.
[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
You see, that part that I made bold there is often forgotten.
The 'exclusive right' serves a purpose, and one can easily argue that as soon as patents no longer serve that purpose, the provision you quoted no longer applies.
The porpose of the patent system is to promote usefull inventions. The exclusive rights are a means for achieving that, they are NOT, I repeat NOT the purpose of the provision in the constitution, and neither should they be the purpose of the patent system.
Also, you may read up on what the founding fathers actually had to say about patents and copyrights and such. You will find that the provision in the constitution is in the end a compromise, and that back then this was already a matter of debate and not very clear cut. Not all founding fathers agreed with the concept.
Moving email to a wireless format has problems not encountered in wired communiations, such as reduced bandwidth.
How good that virtually all protocols involved in email already existed back in the days when the Internet backbone had less bandwidth then a typical GPRS connection nowadays.
There are problems with wireless email, but those have a lot more to do with how to deliver email to a wireless device without having that device waste its battery in no-time, and even the solution to that is pretty obvious.
In 1991 the GSM networks were not comemrc ially operational yet, but the technology existed and was being refined.
A 2 way 'paging' system is an inherent part of the GSM network, with the resulting possibility to deliver small messages to a cellular device as long as it is 'listening' to the network. This idea wasn't invented for the GSM network either, but it was essential for it to allow for 'roaming'. It was used for testing by sending small messages back and forth, and we now know a small frontend to it as sms or text messages. Does it do email? well, not in the 'traditional' sense of smtp mail as used on the internet, but when I got my first GSM phone in 1993 there were gateways that connected the 2 already, and I could get email delivered to my mobile, ie, no need to 'pull' it from servers or whatever. The RIM implementation differs from this in the sense that they trigger software that allows for delivering a 'traditional' email message directly to the device instead of forwarding it over sms, but triggering software that way was happenign from the start, what do you think is producing that beep on your phone when a message arrives? It turns on the backlit on my phoen also, why not turn on another device that you find usefull on receiving a message?
This is why RIM's technology wasn't new or non-obvious when their devices hit the market, it is also why the NTP patent on this is extremely dubious, it IS an obvious combination of pre-existing technologies and the motivation is an obvious idea depicted in science fiction for years if not decades before someone decided it was now actually feasable to combine those and make a marketable device based on it.
While not being the person you replied to, I still feel qualified to answer because the things you bring up are often brought up against those who oppose patents in their current form.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever to back any of this up?
Google around for nonsense patents. Seeing the things that are getting through in my field of experience is telling me that the USPTO is not qualified to judge non-obviousness at least in my field (software development).
My assumption is that your opinion is nothing but a rabid ignorance of patent law and a absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the patent examining procedure.
There are 2 things that take priority over the patent examining procedure:
1. The constitution 2. Patent law.
2 is supposedly based on 1, and esp. 1. is very clear as to what purpose patents serve: To promote usefull inventions.
As soon as the effect of the patent system is no longer promoting usefull inventions, the patent system has failed. The actual patent examining procedure is completely and utterly irrelevant for that argument, and is merely a distraction.
Simplistic protocols like TCP and UDP do not hold up in such an evironment.
Oh, they quite do.
You may not have thought of it, but ip over sms is quite possible for example (not very efficient for most purposes, but quite enough for a small notification system)
The 'genius' of RIM in this was to use an existing notification system to trigger their device, still othing non obvious or new there, sms messages have triggered phones into things like displaying messages, making sounds and so on, no reason why triggering yet another function you put in there is new or non obvious or such.
The makes of Doom 3 didn't provide me anything of value, why should I pay for the right to use their code?
1. That relates to copyright, not patents 2. If you use their code they provided something that obviously has some value to you, their code. Or do you make a habbit out of using useless stuff?
RIM has a product and then sues others who try to implement something similar NTP has no product other then a pile of papers describing partially obvious ideas.
It doesn't matter if RIM were right or not in sueing Handspring, that is something that can be decided in court. What matters is that they actually do something with their claimed inventions.
When arguing that RIM should have responded to NTP, people are right of course, arguing that RIM has to adhere to the law in ther USA when tradign there is also correct of course. What isn't correct is that tha law seemingly allows for this kind of situation. It is wrong because it makes that law underminde the exact provision in the constitution on which that law is based.
Getting a patent automatically publishes the information in the patent. That publishing, in and of itself, constitutes "encouraging progress".
Provided that:
1. That publication actually discloses information that is not yet known 2. That publication actually discloses information that is usefull for someone in the field, so not a patent attorney, but an inventor or scientist in the field to which the patent applies in order to recreate the invention 3. The published information is actually 'non obvious'.
For all I can judge, the NTP patents fail in at all 3.
Then, sitting there and demanding money from anyone who by chance or on purpose happens to think up the same obvious thing as they did, they are definitely hindering progress by puttign an extra burden upon anyone who actually wants to make some progress.
Now, if their patents would actually forfill the above 3 requirements, are valid in all other aspects, and NTP would be actuively involved in getting the invention used one way or another, they would have a leg to stand on, but right now they try to get the letter of the law enforced against the spirit of that same law.
The only screwup in this fiasco is RMI. They ahd an opportunity to settle but they thought they were smarter and bigger and could ignore NTP. They deserve to be obliterated as a result. This will teach those stupid Canadians to respect our authority. If they want to try this bullshit in Europe, go right ahead.
Hello Nationalistic idiot.
I sufggest you go learn something about reason and logic, you seem to have some big trouble with those.
I also suggest that someday, once you managed the reason and logic part, you go read this fabulous document called the constitution, and esp. the letters written by the people who founded that country you are so fond of.
Don't come back untill the day you understand those and can see why you currently are acting like a complete and utter moron.
For example, remember the whole 'air travel is safer than cars' thing? Any individual accident with a plane tends to kill more people than even the worst car wrecks, simply because you have hundreds of people on commercial planes.
Yes, I brought that one up myself a few posts back. That is also exactly my point, you can reason all you want about what is more dangerous, but thta in itself is not going to change the perception people have. Incidents like CHernobyl do. Is that logical? no, but it is for as far as I can observe how people work anyway.
I responded to your post because ignoring part of the consequences of such an incident are only going to cause people to distrust your reasoning, and that is in no way going to help your case, neither is arguing that there are worse things, even when you can 'prove' it with statistics.
You're kind of missing the point. Of course support for WOL has to be in the LAN card. But that support isn't much use if the LAN card isn't getting power. So using WOL expends a small amount of power even when the system is off, just as the instant-on feature of TV sets does.
Without power it is not going to work at all, seems rather obvious really. A powered off system with wake on lan enabled is going to come a lot closer to the 1 watt initiative of EPA then almost any TV on standby mode however. Indeed a PC in that mode uses very little power, if you had read the article we are supposedly discussing, you'd have seen that most TVs in standby mode use a substantial amount of power.
At any rate, this was not the question the grantparent asked, rather, the question was about WOL working with Linux. I don't see what point I missed in answering that question really, please enlighten me how your comment is in any way relevant to the grantparent and my post.
To be fair, this is a country not un-familiar with people relocating due to disaster. See every year in florida (hurricanes) and every few years in california (earthquakes/fires) and every year in the midwest (tornadoes). Honestly, another disaster to force people to give up their livelyhoods would be just routine here.
Hmm yeah, after a tornado or hurricane or earthquake, one can rebuild their livelyood within forseeable time (it might not be wise to go back to the same old dangeroud place, but hey, people for whatever reason do that anyway often). It will be a few decades at the very least before you can even start thinking about that in the area around a blown up nuclear power plant. There is a slight difference there I'd think.
But honestly, arguing why the fear people have is unreasonable is fine when talking to peopel who also believe that fear to be unreasonable, but it is not going to convince people who do hold that unreasonable fear really. If you feel like addressing that fear, you better start listenign and understanding what it is that those peopel are thinking, REGARDLESS of their thoughts making sense to you, because it is their thoughts that you'll have to address, and as you probably found out aready, many of those thoughts do not exactly follow reason, and as I already mentioned, reasoning and logical arguments are very unlikely to make a change there.
We've come a long way since then. Ignorance is emminently fixable.
Oh, it often is, and udnerstanding what happens does help. Becomming familiar with a situation that you fear helps as well, but neither are a soluton, at best they are a small part of a solution.
Not to mention the fact that there are still quite a few peopel who are unreasonably afraid of thunderstorms, spiders, heights and so on, in all cases things where one can reasonably understand the 'dangers' and can avoid most of the risk.
56 deaths from Chernobyl totally outweigh non-nuclear events such as the Bhopal chemical spill which killed a mere 3,800 people. Heck, it outweighs the average US death rate from coal mining of 45 a year.
Nack when the Chernobyl accident happened, I had a girlfriend whom's dad is a farmer. Now, I live in western Europe, so quite a bit away from Chernobyl, but despite that, this farmer could throw away part of his products of that season due to contamination. He was nto alone in that.
You may have noticed (or heard) that there were quite a few people living in the vicinity of the power plant. They had to leave their houses, many of their belongings, and generally spoken, their livelyhood.
If you believe that the consequences of Chernobyl were 56 dead and thats it then you are stupidly naive.
That is not to say that it was worse then Nohpal, it doesn't compare because it is an entirely different kind of accident. Comparing it to the death toll from coal mining makes as little sense because those deaths do not happen in a single accident usually.
Also, little of the fear for nuclear power is based on reason, and no amount of reason is going to 'fix' that fear.
Coal isn't better, but if you read my post better, you'd see that I am saying that such arguments simply don't matter in the minds of people. The fear for nuclear power has nothing to do with reason, so no amount of reason is going to change it.
I am NOT agruing for or against nuclear energy, I am pointing out WHY this kind of argument did not convin ce people to not fear it. My own opinion on what is better etc is NOT what I am debating here and is not in any way related to what I am writing here, so please stop trying to argue it.
I'll even guess that more people have died while bungy jumping then have from nuclear power accidents.
Could well be, there is a small but relevant difference however.. With bungy jumping, you jump, you take the risk, and you can decide to not do it. With a nuclear power plant ran by someone else you can't 'controll' the risk in such a way.
This is the same kind of thing that makes people step into a car without a thought yet be scared of flying in an airplane, while it seems likely to me they have a betetr chance of dying in that car then in that airplane.
Becomming familiar with a situation helps more then reason usually in such cases.
The problem for people who oppose nuclear power is not just the chance of things going wrong, but the scale of the dissaster when things really go wrong. While I do not oppose nuclear energy, I do see the validity of that way fo looking at it.
Since perl scripts running on a Linux machine have access to the commandline, yes, they can send raw ethernet packages, given they run with the correct privileges and availability of correct tools. No native capability in perl for doing this is required at all. When running natively compiled JAVA on the same platform, and giving it access to the commandline, you'd have the exact same situation.
The bios has to support it, the nic has to support it and it may require a cable between your mobo and nic in order to work..
When your firmware and hardware don't support this correctly then obviously it is not going to work, regardless of what OS you are trying to boot..
The question I replied to was asking specifically about using this with Linux, that more or less implies that the hardware being used itself is fully capable. My answer was to point out that Linux has nothing to do with the matter in virtually all cases.
Why not do what ASUS, MSI and some others are already doing, and which is pretty common for embedded devics with some flash rom in it also..
Ha a seperate rom with a recovery utility that you can trigger on power-on? That way you can recover from a messed up bios, regardless of why it got messed up (upgrades do go wrong at times as well, ie, power loss during flash write)
WakeOnLan is basicly a matter of sending a 'magic packet' to the MAC address of the comuter you want to wake up. There is no need ofr the OS on that machine to actually support that functionality (except for there being a few cards around that require WOL to be re-enabled after each boot).
Sending the 'magic packet' is not difficult, and there is a variety of tools that can do this, including a ready made perl script, on a gentoo system, type 'emerge wakeonlan'. I bet it is available with most other distributions as well.
The only problem with a PDA and 'mail push' is its battery life. A smartphone does not have this problem at all, and push technology to get notifications or info to a phone ona GSM or GPRS network has been there for as long as those 2 exist, or do you really think a phone is continuesly polling for text and multimedia messages? You realize how easy it is to trigger a mail receiver with that and and then initialize the mail transfer? That is also what this 'pager' functionality in Blackberries does basicly. Oh, and I hope that RIM is not using the pager network for it still because that network is not going to last very long in most parts of the world if it is still there at all, not to mention that there is no 'roaming' possible with pager networks (since the device never 'talks back' there is no way whatsoever of knowing where it is)
Blackberries are nice because of how well integrated the functionality is, and in a way, because of how they make good use of existing technology. Do not make the mistake however to believe that there is any tec hnology that is exclusive to the Blackberry, there isn't, and it is not doing anything that cannot be reproduceded with off-the-shelf hardware and custom software on todays generally available cellphone networks. Their 'trick' is in this custom software and the server end of this, oh, and they got it in a nice sturdy package of course.
O'd suggest you look a bit into mobile communications technology (pagers, cell phones, wireless packet switched networks and the like), you'll understand a lot better what I'm saying when knowing what those technologies can do and what their limitations are. That said, it will also be obvious why the current patent litigation agains RIM is rubbish, there is really nothing 'new' technology wise in what they do, nor is it non-obvious.
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Granted the US market is very important, but RIM will have the global arena. the US just screws itself from not having Blackberrys.
Seems to be typical when it comes to things that have to do with cellular networks.. hugely popular in the USA, they just have to use a system different from what the rest of the world uses (ok, they are catching up now). Past experience of course tells us that that just results in a more expensive system that easily gets outdated and becomes a bother when travelling cross-border, but who cares.
20 years does not qualify as 'a few years' with the current pace of development of new technologies, it rather qualifies as more then long enough to make the invention outdated and irrelevant in many cases.
The basic idea behind patents is a good one I believe, the current implementation however is bad for a multitude of reasons, the one I just mentioned being only one of those reasons.
They won the patent, they can do with it what they want. So what if they didn't have the capital or knowhow to develop a nationwide wireless messaging network? How does this requirement protect "the little guy?" They won a patent for the technology and have a right to defend it.
The purpose of the patent system is to PROMOTE USEFULL INVENTIONS, not to protect the 'little guy'.
If this 'little guy' does a usefull invention, the patent system should help him protect it enough to be able to proffit from it of course, and it may even be fair to favor the 'little guy' over the big corporation in that, but this is all about the means, and not about the actual goal of the patent system.
Oh, and what I forgot in my previous post:
[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
You see, that part that I made bold there is often forgotten.
The 'exclusive right' serves a purpose, and one can easily argue that as soon as patents no longer serve that purpose, the provision you quoted no longer applies.
The porpose of the patent system is to promote usefull inventions. The exclusive rights are a means for achieving that, they are NOT, I repeat NOT the purpose of the provision in the constitution, and neither should they be the purpose of the patent system.
Also, you may read up on what the founding fathers actually had to say about patents and copyrights and such. You will find that the provision in the constitution is in the end a compromise, and that back then this was already a matter of debate and not very clear cut. Not all founding fathers agreed with the concept.
Moving email to a wireless format has problems not encountered in wired communiations, such as reduced bandwidth.
How good that virtually all protocols involved in email already existed back in the days when the Internet backbone had less bandwidth then a typical GPRS connection nowadays.
There are problems with wireless email, but those have a lot more to do with how to deliver email to a wireless device without having that device waste its battery in no-time, and even the solution to that is pretty obvious.
In 1991 the GSM networks were not comemrc ially operational yet, but the technology existed and was being refined.
A 2 way 'paging' system is an inherent part of the GSM network, with the resulting possibility to deliver small messages to a cellular device as long as it is 'listening' to the network. This idea wasn't invented for the GSM network either, but it was essential for it to allow for 'roaming'. It was used for testing by sending small messages back and forth, and we now know a small frontend to it as sms or text messages. Does it do email? well, not in the 'traditional' sense of smtp mail as used on the internet, but when I got my first GSM phone in 1993 there were gateways that connected the 2 already, and I could get email delivered to my mobile, ie, no need to 'pull' it from servers or whatever. The RIM implementation differs from this in the sense that they trigger software that allows for delivering a 'traditional' email message directly to the device instead of forwarding it over sms, but triggering software that way was happenign from the start, what do you think is producing that beep on your phone when a message arrives? It turns on the backlit on my phoen also, why not turn on another device that you find usefull on receiving a message?
This is why RIM's technology wasn't new or non-obvious when their devices hit the market, it is also why the NTP patent on this is extremely dubious, it IS an obvious combination of pre-existing technologies and the motivation is an obvious idea depicted in science fiction for years if not decades before someone decided it was now actually feasable to combine those and make a marketable device based on it.
While not being the person you replied to, I still feel qualified to answer because the things you bring up are often brought up against those who oppose patents in their current form.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever to back any of this up?
Google around for nonsense patents. Seeing the things that are getting through in my field of experience is telling me that the USPTO is not qualified to judge non-obviousness at least in my field (software development).
My assumption is that your opinion is nothing but a rabid ignorance of patent law and a absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the patent examining procedure.
There are 2 things that take priority over the patent examining procedure:
1. The constitution
2. Patent law.
2 is supposedly based on 1, and esp. 1. is very clear as to what purpose patents serve: To promote usefull inventions.
As soon as the effect of the patent system is no longer promoting usefull inventions, the patent system has failed. The actual patent examining procedure is completely and utterly irrelevant for that argument, and is merely a distraction.
Simplistic protocols like TCP and UDP do not hold up in such an evironment.
Oh, they quite do.
You may not have thought of it, but ip over sms is quite possible for example (not very efficient for most purposes, but quite enough for a small notification system)
The 'genius' of RIM in this was to use an existing notification system to trigger their device, still othing non obvious or new there, sms messages have triggered phones into things like displaying messages, making sounds and so on, no reason why triggering yet another function you put in there is new or non obvious or such.
The makes of Doom 3 didn't provide me anything of value, why should I pay for the right to use their code?
1. That relates to copyright, not patents
2. If you use their code they provided something that obviously has some value to you, their code. Or do you make a habbit out of using useless stuff?
RIM has a product and then sues others who try to implement something similar
NTP has no product other then a pile of papers describing partially obvious ideas.
It doesn't matter if RIM were right or not in sueing Handspring, that is something that can be decided in court.
What matters is that they actually do something with their claimed inventions.
When arguing that RIM should have responded to NTP, people are right of course, arguing that RIM has to adhere to the law in ther USA when tradign there is also correct of course. What isn't correct is that tha law seemingly allows for this kind of situation. It is wrong because it makes that law underminde the exact provision in the constitution on which that law is based.
Getting a patent automatically publishes the information in the patent. That publishing, in and of itself, constitutes "encouraging progress".
Provided that:
1. That publication actually discloses information that is not yet known
2. That publication actually discloses information that is usefull for someone in the field, so not a patent attorney, but an inventor or scientist in the field to which the patent applies in order to recreate the invention
3. The published information is actually 'non obvious'.
For all I can judge, the NTP patents fail in at all 3.
Then, sitting there and demanding money from anyone who by chance or on purpose happens to think up the same obvious thing as they did, they are definitely hindering progress by puttign an extra burden upon anyone who actually wants to make some progress.
Now, if their patents would actually forfill the above 3 requirements, are valid in all other aspects, and NTP would be actuively involved in getting the invention used one way or another, they would have a leg to stand on, but right now they try to get the letter of the law enforced against the spirit of that same law.
The only screwup in this fiasco is RMI. They ahd an opportunity to settle but they thought they were smarter and bigger and could ignore NTP. They deserve to be obliterated as a result. This will teach those stupid Canadians to respect our authority. If they want to try this bullshit in Europe, go right ahead.
Hello Nationalistic idiot.
I sufggest you go learn something about reason and logic, you seem to have some big trouble with those.
I also suggest that someday, once you managed the reason and logic part, you go read this fabulous document called the constitution, and esp. the letters written by the people who founded that country you are so fond of.
Don't come back untill the day you understand those and can see why you currently are acting like a complete and utter moron.
For example, remember the whole 'air travel is safer than cars' thing? Any individual accident with a plane tends to kill more people than even the worst car wrecks, simply because you have hundreds of people on commercial planes.
Yes, I brought that one up myself a few posts back. That is also exactly my point, you can reason all you want about what is more dangerous, but thta in itself is not going to change the perception people have. Incidents like CHernobyl do. Is that logical? no, but it is for as far as I can observe how people work anyway.
I responded to your post because ignoring part of the consequences of such an incident are only going to cause people to distrust your reasoning, and that is in no way going to help your case, neither is arguing that there are worse things, even when you can 'prove' it with statistics.
You're kind of missing the point. Of course support for WOL has to be in the LAN card. But that support isn't much use if the LAN card isn't getting power. So using WOL expends a small amount of power even when the system is off, just as the instant-on feature of TV sets does.
Without power it is not going to work at all, seems rather obvious really. A powered off system with wake on lan enabled is going to come a lot closer to the 1 watt initiative of EPA then almost any TV on standby mode however. Indeed a PC in that mode uses very little power, if you had read the article we are supposedly discussing, you'd have seen that most TVs in standby mode use a substantial amount of power.
At any rate, this was not the question the grantparent asked, rather, the question was about WOL working with Linux. I don't see what point I missed in answering that question really, please enlighten me how your comment is in any way relevant to the grantparent and my post.
To be fair, this is a country not un-familiar with people relocating due to disaster. See every year in florida (hurricanes) and every few years in california (earthquakes/fires) and every year in the midwest (tornadoes). Honestly, another disaster to force people to give up their livelyhoods would be just routine here.
Hmm yeah, after a tornado or hurricane or earthquake, one can rebuild their livelyood within forseeable time (it might not be wise to go back to the same old dangeroud place, but hey, people for whatever reason do that anyway often). It will be a few decades at the very least before you can even start thinking about that in the area around a blown up nuclear power plant. There is a slight difference there I'd think.
But honestly, arguing why the fear people have is unreasonable is fine when talking to peopel who also believe that fear to be unreasonable, but it is not going to convince people who do hold that unreasonable fear really. If you feel like addressing that fear, you better start listenign and understanding what it is that those peopel are thinking, REGARDLESS of their thoughts making sense to you, because it is their thoughts that you'll have to address, and as you probably found out aready, many of those thoughts do not exactly follow reason, and as I already mentioned, reasoning and logical arguments are very unlikely to make a change there.
We've come a long way since then. Ignorance is emminently fixable.
Oh, it often is, and udnerstanding what happens does help. Becomming familiar with a situation that you fear helps as well, but neither are a soluton, at best they are a small part of a solution.
Not to mention the fact that there are still quite a few peopel who are unreasonably afraid of thunderstorms, spiders, heights and so on, in all cases things where one can reasonably understand the 'dangers' and can avoid most of the risk.
56 deaths from Chernobyl totally outweigh non-nuclear events such as the Bhopal chemical spill which killed a mere 3,800 people. Heck, it outweighs the average US death rate from coal mining of 45 a year.
Nack when the Chernobyl accident happened, I had a girlfriend whom's dad is a farmer. Now, I live in western Europe, so quite a bit away from Chernobyl, but despite that, this farmer could throw away part of his products of that season due to contamination. He was nto alone in that.
You may have noticed (or heard) that there were quite a few people living in the vicinity of the power plant. They had to leave their houses, many of their belongings, and generally spoken, their livelyhood.
If you believe that the consequences of Chernobyl were 56 dead and thats it then you are stupidly naive.
That is not to say that it was worse then Nohpal, it doesn't compare because it is an entirely different kind of accident. Comparing it to the death toll from coal mining makes as little sense because those deaths do not happen in a single accident usually.
Also, little of the fear for nuclear power is based on reason, and no amount of reason is going to 'fix' that fear.
Coal isn't better, but if you read my post better, you'd see that I am saying that such arguments simply don't matter in the minds of people. The fear for nuclear power has nothing to do with reason, so no amount of reason is going to change it.
I am NOT agruing for or against nuclear energy, I am pointing out WHY this kind of argument did not convin ce people to not fear it. My own opinion on what is better etc is NOT what I am debating here and is not in any way related to what I am writing here, so please stop trying to argue it.
I'll even guess that more people have died while bungy jumping then have from nuclear power accidents.
Could well be, there is a small but relevant difference however.. With bungy jumping, you jump, you take the risk, and you can decide to not do it. With a nuclear power plant ran by someone else you can't 'controll' the risk in such a way.
This is the same kind of thing that makes people step into a car without a thought yet be scared of flying in an airplane, while it seems likely to me they have a betetr chance of dying in that car then in that airplane.
Becomming familiar with a situation helps more then reason usually in such cases.
The problem for people who oppose nuclear power is not just the chance of things going wrong, but the scale of the dissaster when things really go wrong. While I do not oppose nuclear energy, I do see the validity of that way fo looking at it.
Since perl scripts running on a Linux machine have access to the commandline, yes, they can send raw ethernet packages, given they run with the correct privileges and availability of correct tools. No native capability in perl for doing this is required at all. When running natively compiled JAVA on the same platform, and giving it access to the commandline, you'd have the exact same situation.
The bios has to support it, the nic has to support it and it may require a cable between your mobo and nic in order to work..
When your firmware and hardware don't support this correctly then obviously it is not going to work, regardless of what OS you are trying to boot..
The question I replied to was asking specifically about using this with Linux, that more or less implies that the hardware being used itself is fully capable. My answer was to point out that Linux has nothing to do with the matter in virtually all cases.
Why not do what ASUS, MSI and some others are already doing, and which is pretty common for embedded devics with some flash rom in it also..
Ha a seperate rom with a recovery utility that you can trigger on power-on? That way you can recover from a messed up bios, regardless of why it got messed up (upgrades do go wrong at times as well, ie, power loss during flash write)
My el-cheapo 3 years old MSI system board has similar functionality (and a very scary optional auto update feature when running windows..)
WakeOnLan is basicly a matter of sending a 'magic packet' to the MAC address of the comuter you want to wake up. There is no need ofr the OS on that machine to actually support that functionality (except for there being a few cards around that require WOL to be re-enabled after each boot).
Sending the 'magic packet' is not difficult, and there is a variety of tools that can do this, including a ready made perl script, on a gentoo system, type 'emerge wakeonlan'. I bet it is available with most other distributions as well.
The only problem with a PDA and 'mail push' is its battery life. A smartphone does not have this problem at all, and push technology to get notifications or info to a phone ona GSM or GPRS network has been there for as long as those 2 exist, or do you really think a phone is continuesly polling for text and multimedia messages? You realize how easy it is to trigger a mail receiver with that and and then initialize the mail transfer? That is also what this 'pager' functionality in Blackberries does basicly. Oh, and I hope that RIM is not using the pager network for it still because that network is not going to last very long in most parts of the world if it is still there at all, not to mention that there is no 'roaming' possible with pager networks (since the device never 'talks back' there is no way whatsoever of knowing where it is)
Blackberries are nice because of how well integrated the functionality is, and in a way, because of how they make good use of existing technology. Do not make the mistake however to believe that there is any tec hnology that is exclusive to the Blackberry, there isn't, and it is not doing anything that cannot be reproduceded with off-the-shelf hardware and custom software on todays generally available cellphone networks. Their 'trick' is in this custom software and the server end of this, oh, and they got it in a nice sturdy package of course.
O'd suggest you look a bit into mobile communications technology (pagers, cell phones, wireless packet switched networks and the like), you'll understand a lot better what I'm saying when knowing what those technologies can do and what their limitations are. That said, it will also be obvious why the current patent litigation agains RIM is rubbish, there is really nothing 'new' technology wise in what they do, nor is it non-obvious.