Of course they have. Didn't you know that it is against the law to file for a patent in the US unless somebody has already been using the idea for years?
I envisioned this sort of things being used for far far future battlefield applications. For example, a high altitude drone with IR sensors could guide a squad through a jungle to their target by buzzing the right or left side of their suits - much shorter radio transmissions than having to say "now he's moving south". With practice you could train soldiers to do a broken field sprint through a (friendly) minefield with gentle buzzes telling them where to step. With sensitive enough sensors you could (theoretically) also be able to detect an inbound bullet quick enough for a reflexive action to turn a clean headshot into a glancing blow or be told roughly where that inbound shell is going to land. Fighter pilots would also benefit if, in additional to visual, radio and radar they had a suit telling them exactly where the bad guy (and his missiles) were.
On a related issue the Michigan Public Services Commission just deregulated all telephone services for the Detroit area under the "competition will benefit the consumer" banner. Unfortunately where I live (largish city currently undergoing a population boom) there is -no- competition for land line. You get Verizon or you don't get a dial tone. Period. And the state of Michigan expects competition to keep down prices.
Not only that, but Verizon flatly refuses to provide DSL service of any kind to this area. You get Comcast Cable or no broadband. But competition will keep the companies in check. Yeah. Right.
Are there any costs for the user associated with this? The main allure of open source software is that it's free.
Free as in a Greatful Dead bootleg? Free software has always been about the code being free, not the media.
If only we could convince AOL to start sending out CD-RWs to everybody in the 3rd world like the floppies of days gone by then they'd be all set.
Seriously though, wouldn't it be a good idea for these kiosks to include an interface for a flash drive? (If the/.'ed article already says that they will I appologize.)
By that measure, "7bDgew24FV3%4lbBså^r!" is as valid as "To be or not to be...". Yes, they are both transmitted pieces of information. They even carry the same length.
The first one is complete rubbish, however.
Context is everything. That funky string of "complete rubbish" happens to be my passphrase for my PGPdisk which contains every Q-level document ever drafted, Jessica Simpson's cell phone # (and complete list of never-fail 100% guaranteed turn-ons) and the complete sourcecode for Microsoft Bob. Still think it "is completely useless"?
Your statement "Not all information is important" must be qualified by &" to all people at all times". And you are correct, the information does not seek to spread on its own: information never does anything but just hang around waiting to be collected like so many rotten pieces of fruit waiting to accelerate into the forehead of some science dude. But given any two life forms that interact, the exchange of information is the absolutely essential foundation of every interaction. Hammers convey to the thumb the information that 15N on a hangnail = pain. Pizza broadcasts the information that it is yummy. Life is about little -other- than the flow and exchange of information... as a result, the artificial obstruction of this exchange is unnatural and prone to failure.
No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist. Fail to remember, fail to record it, fail to anything with it and it doesn't exist.
Nature records information all the time. There will always be information available to any who wish to retrieve it. It will always exist: a single atom of hydrogen at coordinates 5.28E25, 1.92883E18E298, 42 contains information and, some might argue, is information itself. It not only contains the information of where it is, but the information of where it is not. Watch its path and it will tell you what has influenced it in the past.
"Information wants to be free" may not be as accurate as "people generally want to share information and make it available", but sounds a bit more philosophicalisticalish.
Personally, I'm on the information-should-freely-flow side of things. With the exception of anything that requires massive quantities of money and very expensive machines and large collections of disciplined manpower there is nothing that the government can do even half as efficiently as the collective power of tens of millions of people with nothing better to do with their time than plink.
If Google is working on a new way of doing RSS advertising, wouldn't it be fiscally irresponsible to NOT try to patent it?
If Google was really interested in long-term not-being-evil and eliminating the badwill of taking out shoddy patents as well as the enormous expense of patent litigation then they would simply start... buyi... bribin... lobbying their congresscritters to eliminate patent protections on such things entirely. There is not a doubt in my mind that if the money spent on fighting/defending Amazon's one-click patent had been reallocated to a few select senators' warchests instead of being spent on lawyers the issue would have been resolved by now.
But the fact remains that far from fighting the broken system Google is buying into the broken system because in the tall grass this is the only way to pee.
We aren't quite to the point where Boxer and Feinstein can be considered to be the senators from Google (as opposed to Senators Murray and Cantwell, D-Microsoft) but Anna Eshoo D-Google could certainly be used to influence the House.
There is a fork here: business as usual or fight the system. We know which way google has gone.
When looking at a printout how do you know which dots were sent via software and which dots were sent via firmware? Unless I am misunderstanding something the dots are -not- printed in an area off-limits to, say, a photoshop dump.
Umm, how can you be anti-subsidy and yet advocate tax exemptions for all new forms of energy?
In my mind there is a distinction between a subsidy which consists of providing funds or resources to offset the costs of development, production or distribution and a temporary waiver of taxation, leaving the innovators to their own devices to find a source of money on their own. The former is an inappropriate abuse, the latter is allowing the free market to decide which strand of pasta thrown against the wall will stick.
The street onto which my driveway feeds is a private road, paid for entirely by the community developer some 30ish years ago. It feeds onto a road originally built some 170 years ago and, until within the past three years had been widened perhaps once and paved (in addition to subsequent maintenance). About five years ago the developers declared open war on all standing trees and threatened to sue the city unless zonings were changed from one house per lot to allow up to 30 residences per lot. One section of road went from an average of 30 seconds to navigate to over 10 minutes in those five years. And they've only completed about 1/3 of the planned development and continue to clearcut for insertion of 100+ unit communities. Now that the roads have been rendered impassible during peak hours of the day the city is begging for tax hikes along with state and federal grants to expand and widen the roads - with the explicitly stated goal of opening up land currently inaccessible to new development.
To add insult to injury, the newly festering sections of the township required the construction of a new firestation, paid for by everybody. My area was already amply serivced with more than adaquate fire response - my position is that those extra 5,000 houses that created the need of the new station should have been called upon to pay for it themselves. Those extra 5,000 units exceeded the supply of water through the local wells so everybody has to chip in for the more expensive municipal water. Because of those 5,000 high-density (8-10 per lot as opposed to 1 per lot) houses don't have enough space for septic fields everybody has to chip in for sewer. Previously adaquate power supplies are now stretched thin so the power company is asking everybody to pay extra to upgrade the lines to service the newcomers.
Now lest it sound like I am complaining exceedingly, I am very happy that I live where I do: 100 yards down the road and I would be within a town with a tax rate three times my current situation, and they are still begging for more. (In moments of schadenfreude I am tempted to send letters to all of these people with "For Sale" signs in their yards for 9-18 months at a time pointing out that if they hadn't voted for all of those tax increases I would have been interested in making an offer. It's true - I can think of five houses I considered essentially perfect, in any of which I would have been perfectly content, but because of the almost-the-highest-in-the-county-and-ever-increasi ng taxes walked away.)
But I digress.
The primary road servicing my area was probably constructed at no public cost by early traders, settlers who knew perfectly well that if they had asked the big city folk for funds they would have been laughed back to the farm. Contrast this with today where a developer sued the city for refusing to build a road to connect the new subdivision. The court awarded the developer most of a local park which was then clearcut and developed.
how about sending the waste in robotic spaceships to be sent to the sun..it would be a viable way to rid ourselves of the waste..there are many studies done on this but noone has come up with a cheap enough way to transport it. I think since the space industry is becoming privatized more and more veeryday we are going to be seeing this in less then 10 years..
This idea has been kicked around over and over but astronomical (pun intended) costs aside the technical details are far more challenging than most people realize. Keeping in mind that we are on a rock whizzing around the sun, in order for a rocket to actually hit the sun it has to dump all of that energy. I don't know if we have any rockets that could actually pull that off. (It would be "cheaper" in terms of fuel to send the stuff out to the very edge of the solar system then let it fall back in, but that would take weeks!
In this case, the Clear Hidden Creek Gold Ridge Mystic Forest Hills Estates should have never been built if there was no infrastructure (read: freeways) to support the development in the first place. A city shouldn't sprawl out until all of its traffic issues have been resolved. When a city has fixed its traffic issues, it then may sprawl out only if it builds more infrastructure to support the higher population.
Cities don't sprawl - developers do. I don't care if Clear Hidden Creek Gold Ridge Mystic Forest Hills Estates Phase I is built with 1,500 units in the middle of nowhere so long as I am not expected to pay for the roads to get out there - either through federal or state/local taxes. My position is that there should be zero subsidies for new developments. Make the developers pay for the roads, the sewer lines, the gas lines, the power lines (which should always be buried these days and require fiber optic lines strung at least to the subdivision, as broadband is almost as important as gas/water/sewer these days. Of course, the developer will simply pass the costs of these along to the buyers which is just fine with me. I deeply resent having special road and sewer millages shoved down my throat because the local infrastructure can no longer support the traffic generated by the latest development of 800 units starting from the "low 350s".
Silly libertarian; since when to private developers build 5 lane highways!?
Anytime there is profit to be made through such an activity. Consider the 91 Express Lanes or the Otay Mesa Toll Road (which was subsidized by the government). While the developers themselves may not build the road there are certainly many people out there willing to engage in such a project.
I lack the programming skills to create such a tool myself, but I find myself wishing for a plugin for Firefox that compares the IP address for whatever site I happen to be browsing with a list of IPs belonging to ISPs known to be spam-friendly. I envision a little indicator that grows red if I am on a site hosted within spam-friendly netspace so I will know not to do business with anybody using a spam-friendly ISP. If the indicator glows red I would send an email to said merchant telling them why I am taking my business elsewhere then close the window.
I believe the most significant positive impact to our environment in the short term would be to increase subsidies to public transportation and to focus on that infrastructure while we get technology to catch up with energy demand.
(Emphasis added, by me, for my own designs.)
Absolutely not. Subsidizing is not the way to go. If you want to improve the environment then eliminate subsidies:
By eliminating the subsidies used to build freeway systems that allow urban sprawl people will be enouraged to live closer to their places of work and play. PLEASE NOTE While I am opposed to sprawl I am not anti-sprawl. Developers should be allowed to build on their land more or less as they see fit. I am opposed to the spending of public funds to make said private land more valuable. If the developers want to get together and build a 5 line highway out to Clear Hidden Creek Golf Ridge Mystic Forest Hills Estates then so be it. So don't even go there.
Start charging fair market value for oil/gas lease and exploration rights on public lands.
Guarantee tax exemption for any and all new forms of energy or energy generation for the five years immediately following patent approval.
Personally I am an advocate of nuclear power. Pebble bed reactors are clean, safe and can take advantage of economies of scale. Somebody (GE, probably) has developed a "disposable" reactor that is comparitively maintenance free, designed as a free-standing generator that can be placed in a village. At the end of its 20-25 year lifespan it is trucked away, waste and all (which is not removed from the structure while on-site) and a new one dropped in its place.
the copyright holders can sell you the song with any restrictions they like, just as I can sell you a 5 acre parcel of land with a deeded restriction that you can never build more than a single house.
Are you sure you've sold me the land then?
Unquestionably. Restrictive covenants are quite common and are probably applied to every modern, newly constructed subdivision. The developer will sell you a house and lot but the deed would clearly stipulate that this lot will forever be subject to the rules of the homeowners' association, will never be subdivided and specify that no shed can be placed on the rearmost 15 feet of your lot set aside for the utility easement. I know of one subdivision going up where all house plans must be approved by the HOA and there is a minimum $/sq ft required to build. If you buy the land the deed clearly states that you must begin construction within x months or you must forfeit the lot. You have a choice: buy the lot and accept the restrictions written into the deed or don't buy the lot.
The same concept could easily be applied to software: rather than selling the right to use the software you should be considered to be purchasing a copy of the software to use as you see fit so long as you abide by the agreements entered into upon purchase. In many ways this would help protect the software producers more than the license-to-use model does.
The blog entry (TFBE?) highlights a huge problem with DRM schemes. You legitimately obtain a copy of a protected work. Years later, something breaks or becomes obsolute. Now you're screwed, because you can't use the protected work that you paid for.
Are you advocating demands that Apple Records provide free music DVDs to everybody who bought Yellow Submarine on 8 Track? If I bought a copy of Ping (book about the duck) and go blind am I entitled to a free copy on tape?
Now on to my real points.
1. This clown needs to be prosecuted for DMCA violations. Not only did he circumvent DRM but he told everybody else how to do it. This blatant recommendation of a tool is nothing short of advocating the theft of copyrighted material.
Unreasonable? Yes, but will the law. It is only through the prosecution of people like this will they start to advocate reasonable positions on DRM. It is the easiest thing in the world to advocate enforcing laws when you aren't subjected to them yourself (which is why Congress and the President have no real incentive to fix social security, for example). If this guy is sued with the same zeal as grandmothers who have 15 year old visitors who installed kazaa on that newfangled box then maybe there would be a louder voice calling for reason.
2. With regards to backup, so long as there exists a legal right to back up digital works (as there should be) then -no- DRM is acceptable for the very reasons mentioned by the OP. If the companies force DRM onto their product then they should be forced to provide replacement media, for free, on demand in perpetuity. The concept of "you don't own the copy of the song you only license it" is BS: the copyright holders can sell you the song with any restrictions they like, just as I can sell you a 5 acre parcel of land with a deeded restriction that you can never build more than a single house.
But so long as people like this guy can advocate DRM yet violate it on whim without consequence and as long as people are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for something with which they are not completely satisfied then nothing will change. Ever. There is no motivation for the companies to do so, so they will not.
Account information = billing information = possible realy identity theft depending on how much information you can get from the account management screens.
True story: a car was stolen and a credit card fell into the wrong hands. The bad guy immediately started making charges all over town, including large ticket items that were delivered to a physical residence and signed for. The police response: "Sorry, there's nothing we can do."
A stolen credit card: just another bit of background static in the everyday noise of crime.
Online crime: newsworthy event that leads to a politician's name plastered over the evening news in a "you'd better reelect me because I'm cracking down on crime" soundbite.
The issue here is not whether or not Windows Antispyware still detects Claria products...the issue is Microsoft's recommendation on said products. While it is true that users still have the option to remove Claria products if they so choose, the fact is that users had the option to keep Claria products on their system back when Microsoft was recommending removal. The insinuation that this change offers users more choice than previously available is tacitly false.
The real issue here is Microsoft abusing their position of trust within the general computer user community. No, I'm not talking about people like us here...I'm talking about Ma and Pa Computer User...the ones who see a virus or spyware warning and panic. Many of these people rely upon the recommendations offered by the spyware detection/removal applications to decide on how best to manage their systems. By artificially upgrading Claria products from 'remove' to 'ignore', Microsoft is taking unfair advantage of these users' trust.
The real issue is "where does Microsoft want to go tomorrow"? Today they downgrade the recommendation on what to do with Claria. Microsoft revolves around the long-term strategy and to believe that this is one of the few times when one of their decisions isn't a stepping stone towards something else is to take the bet on the horse with the longest odds on the field.
Deciding to steal bandwidth after you bring your wardrive to a halt is [a crime].
You miss the point. Actually, you miss a few of them, though I can not determine if you are intentionally missing the points or honestly fail to understand the specifics of this situation.
But first, let me make my position regarding end users of technology perfectly clear:
The end user is responsible for knowing how his device functions and is responsible for using said device in a manner consistent with his own personal wishes.
If you don't agree with this, then you may as well stop reading now: people who excuse any combination of ignorance, voluntary stupidity, ineptness, sloth, failure to read and at least attempt to comprehend instructions and/or accept the natural consequences of deliberate actions are of no concern to me. If you tolerate, exuse, endorse or participate in any of the above then in a nutshell I don't care what you have to think.
There are two parties involved here: we'll call them Q (the tech-saavy homeowner) and Pon, the Mensa-qualifier who thought that sitting in front of the guy's house for hours on end was a stroke of brilliance.
Let's examine the actions (or lack thereof) of Q first.
Q buys a wireless access point. According to my standards at this point he willingly assumes responsibility for configuring and operating the device according to his own personal wishes, desires, fetishes, dreams, schemes, wants, needs and lusts. Q installed his device and knowingly and admittedly operated the device with the following paremeters:
- Said device would advertise its presence to any and all devices equipped and configured to receive such advertisements
- Said device would provide internet connectivity upon demand to any and all devices upon request
This operation was consistent with the design and configuration of this and all similar devices. It is clearly documented and well-known that any person who does not accept these parameters of operation must perform a few token and trivial operations. Q admitted that he was aware of this need and that he understood how to perform these steps, yet made a conscious decision to allow his access point open and available for public use. His claim that most of his neighbors were elderly does not preclude the possibility of any of them buying a computer and connecting to his network, a decidedly non-zero probability.
So we have the following:
1. Q admitted knowing that his AP is designed to advertise network availability
2. Q admitted knowing that his AP offered the advertised network availability and provided it upon request by any and all devices so equipped
3. Q admitted knowing that he could deny general, public access at any time and with intention and deliberation aforethought declined to provide any indication to any party that he wished to use this device in any manner other than initially configured.
So where is the theft?
There was no physical trespass. Pon was in a private vehicle in a public place. The invitation to connect to Q's network was knowingly and intentionally broadcast over public, unallocated frequencies with the explicit (and confirmed) knowledge and permission of Q. Q knowingly and deliberately plugged in a device that actively solicited general and public connections. I can only rephrase this so many different ways - the situation is clear: Q knew that his AP was designed to actively invite any and all devices to connect to his network and knowingly and intentionally made no effort to prevent his device from doing so, even though the steps to do so are trivial and within his ability to accomplish.
It is painfully clear that there was no theft - there was, however, acceptance of an offer.
Amateur radio is used daily in many public service capacities:
Many, if not most SKYWARN groups use amateur radio to coordinate severe weather verification with the national weather service.
Here in Michigan amateur radios operators are used to verify that the tornado sirens work.
All hospitals are being equipped with shortwave radios for use during states of general emergency. During the big blackout the cell phone networks were a) overloaded then b) dead as the reserve power units ran out of juice.
Amateur operators routinely provide assistance during major events such as bike-a-thons, or the Woodward Dream Cruise
Amateur operators routinely carry traffic to/from disaster-struck areas worldwide. As I type this emergency nets are ready to get information into and out of hurricane stricken areas.
Amateur radio is the original version of the chat room and continues to serve this purpose
Many of the advancements in satellite communication were helped by experimenting amateurs - the original homebrew movement.
Amateur radio continues to serve a valuable purpose and definitely has a place in this world. For those seeking a technical challenge beyond executing a kiddie's scripts I suggest you attempt to pass your license exam and try to make even a single connection via packet or microwave.
In fact the man is not being accused of WarDriving. He peformed other illegal activites while on the network which he is being charged with, like trying to gain access to the residents computers, etc.
TFA:
Smith... has been charged with unauthorized access to a computer network
IE Smith was charged for war driving. Period. There is NO indication that he performed ANY illegal activities other than allowing his computer to respond to an invitation to connect to the network that was sent by the AP.
More from TFA:
It remains unclear what Smith was using the Wi-Fi for, to surf, play online video games, send e-mail to his grandmother, or something more nefarious. Prosecutors declined to comment, and Smith could not be reached.
If you have further information, please provide. If you don't, then don't ask people to RTFA to ascertain information that simply isn't there.
Yahoo! Shopping is usually my first destination. They are like virtual shopping mall, where merchants register their stores and list their inventories in some unified format for "across the site" searching. One merchant once mentioned on the phone, that he found Yahoo's terms to be the most reasonable around.
Unfortunately Yahoo! is extremely tolerant of spammers. One of their merchants has been spamming me for years and proudly had Yahoo! merchant logos all over their site. Repeated requests to both the merchant and Yahoo! were ignored and the spam continued.
I don't do business with spammers or their partners.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they have. Didn't you know that it is against the law to file for a patent in the US unless somebody has already been using the idea for years?
But what is the japanese word for "slashdotted off the face of the planet"?
I envisioned this sort of things being used for far far future battlefield applications. For example, a high altitude drone with IR sensors could guide a squad through a jungle to their target by buzzing the right or left side of their suits - much shorter radio transmissions than having to say "now he's moving south". With practice you could train soldiers to do a broken field sprint through a (friendly) minefield with gentle buzzes telling them where to step. With sensitive enough sensors you could (theoretically) also be able to detect an inbound bullet quick enough for a reflexive action to turn a clean headshot into a glancing blow or be told roughly where that inbound shell is going to land. Fighter pilots would also benefit if, in additional to visual, radio and radar they had a suit telling them exactly where the bad guy (and his missiles) were.
In their sweaty little palms, only they don't point north but rather towards Boca Raton.
Not only that, but Verizon flatly refuses to provide DSL service of any kind to this area. You get Comcast Cable or no broadband. But competition will keep the companies in check. Yeah. Right.
> SELECT * FROM MPSC WHERE clue > 0
(yeah, yeah, blatant ripoff, but I'm irked)
Free as in a Greatful Dead bootleg? Free software has always been about the code being free, not the media.
If only we could convince AOL to start sending out CD-RWs to everybody in the 3rd world like the floppies of days gone by then they'd be all set.
Seriously though, wouldn't it be a good idea for these kiosks to include an interface for a flash drive? (If the /.'ed article already says that they will I appologize.)
Context is everything. That funky string of "complete rubbish" happens to be my passphrase for my PGPdisk which contains every Q-level document ever drafted, Jessica Simpson's cell phone # (and complete list of never-fail 100% guaranteed turn-ons) and the complete sourcecode for Microsoft Bob. Still think it "is completely useless"?
Your statement "Not all information is important" must be qualified by &" to all people at all times". And you are correct, the information does not seek to spread on its own: information never does anything but just hang around waiting to be collected like so many rotten pieces of fruit waiting to accelerate into the forehead of some science dude. But given any two life forms that interact, the exchange of information is the absolutely essential foundation of every interaction. Hammers convey to the thumb the information that 15N on a hangnail = pain. Pizza broadcasts the information that it is yummy. Life is about little -other- than the flow and exchange of information... as a result, the artificial obstruction of this exchange is unnatural and prone to failure.
Nature records information all the time. There will always be information available to any who wish to retrieve it. It will always exist: a single atom of hydrogen at coordinates 5.28E25, 1.92883E18E298, 42 contains information and, some might argue, is information itself. It not only contains the information of where it is, but the information of where it is not. Watch its path and it will tell you what has influenced it in the past.
"Information wants to be free" may not be as accurate as "people generally want to share information and make it available", but sounds a bit more philosophicalisticalish.
Personally, I'm on the information-should-freely-flow side of things. With the exception of anything that requires massive quantities of money and very expensive machines and large collections of disciplined manpower there is nothing that the government can do even half as efficiently as the collective power of tens of millions of people with nothing better to do with their time than plink.
If Google was really interested in long-term not-being-evil and eliminating the badwill of taking out shoddy patents as well as the enormous expense of patent litigation then they would simply start... buyi... bribin... lobbying their congresscritters to eliminate patent protections on such things entirely. There is not a doubt in my mind that if the money spent on fighting/defending Amazon's one-click patent had been reallocated to a few select senators' warchests instead of being spent on lawyers the issue would have been resolved by now.
But the fact remains that far from fighting the broken system Google is buying into the broken system because in the tall grass this is the only way to pee.
We aren't quite to the point where Boxer and Feinstein can be considered to be the senators from Google (as opposed to Senators Murray and Cantwell, D-Microsoft) but Anna Eshoo D-Google could certainly be used to influence the House.
There is a fork here: business as usual or fight the system. We know which way google has gone.
When looking at a printout how do you know which dots were sent via software and which dots were sent via firmware? Unless I am misunderstanding something the dots are -not- printed in an area off-limits to, say, a photoshop dump.
In my mind there is a distinction between a subsidy which consists of providing funds or resources to offset the costs of development, production or distribution and a temporary waiver of taxation, leaving the innovators to their own devices to find a source of money on their own. The former is an inappropriate abuse, the latter is allowing the free market to decide which strand of pasta thrown against the wall will stick.
To add insult to injury, the newly festering sections of the township required the construction of a new firestation, paid for by everybody. My area was already amply serivced with more than adaquate fire response - my position is that those extra 5,000 houses that created the need of the new station should have been called upon to pay for it themselves. Those extra 5,000 units exceeded the supply of water through the local wells so everybody has to chip in for the more expensive municipal water. Because of those 5,000 high-density (8-10 per lot as opposed to 1 per lot) houses don't have enough space for septic fields everybody has to chip in for sewer. Previously adaquate power supplies are now stretched thin so the power company is asking everybody to pay extra to upgrade the lines to service the newcomers.
Now lest it sound like I am complaining exceedingly, I am very happy that I live where I do: 100 yards down the road and I would be within a town with a tax rate three times my current situation, and they are still begging for more. (In moments of schadenfreude I am tempted to send letters to all of these people with "For Sale" signs in their yards for 9-18 months at a time pointing out that if they hadn't voted for all of those tax increases I would have been interested in making an offer. It's true - I can think of five houses I considered essentially perfect, in any of which I would have been perfectly content, but because of the almost-the-highest-in-the-county-and-ever-increasi ng taxes walked away.)
But I digress.
The primary road servicing my area was probably constructed at no public cost by early traders, settlers who knew perfectly well that if they had asked the big city folk for funds they would have been laughed back to the farm. Contrast this with today where a developer sued the city for refusing to build a road to connect the new subdivision. The court awarded the developer most of a local park which was then clearcut and developed.
This idea has been kicked around over and over but astronomical (pun intended) costs aside the technical details are far more challenging than most people realize. Keeping in mind that we are on a rock whizzing around the sun, in order for a rocket to actually hit the sun it has to dump all of that energy. I don't know if we have any rockets that could actually pull that off. (It would be "cheaper" in terms of fuel to send the stuff out to the very edge of the solar system then let it fall back in, but that would take weeks!
Cities don't sprawl - developers do. I don't care if Clear Hidden Creek Gold Ridge Mystic Forest Hills Estates Phase I is built with 1,500 units in the middle of nowhere so long as I am not expected to pay for the roads to get out there - either through federal or state/local taxes. My position is that there should be zero subsidies for new developments. Make the developers pay for the roads, the sewer lines, the gas lines, the power lines (which should always be buried these days and require fiber optic lines strung at least to the subdivision, as broadband is almost as important as gas/water/sewer these days. Of course, the developer will simply pass the costs of these along to the buyers which is just fine with me. I deeply resent having special road and sewer millages shoved down my throat because the local infrastructure can no longer support the traffic generated by the latest development of 800 units starting from the "low 350s".
Anytime there is profit to be made through such an activity. Consider the 91 Express Lanes or the Otay Mesa Toll Road (which was subsidized by the government). While the developers themselves may not build the road there are certainly many people out there willing to engage in such a project.
I lack the programming skills to create such a tool myself, but I find myself wishing for a plugin for Firefox that compares the IP address for whatever site I happen to be browsing with a list of IPs belonging to ISPs known to be spam-friendly. I envision a little indicator that grows red if I am on a site hosted within spam-friendly netspace so I will know not to do business with anybody using a spam-friendly ISP. If the indicator glows red I would send an email to said merchant telling them why I am taking my business elsewhere then close the window.
Absolutely not. Subsidizing is not the way to go. If you want to improve the environment then eliminate subsidies:
- By eliminating the subsidies used to build freeway systems that allow urban sprawl people will be enouraged to live closer to their places of work and play. PLEASE NOTE While I am opposed to sprawl I am not anti-sprawl. Developers should be allowed to build on their land more or less as they see fit. I am opposed to the spending of public funds to make said private land more valuable. If the developers want to get together and build a 5 line highway out to Clear Hidden Creek Golf Ridge Mystic Forest Hills Estates then so be it. So don't even go there.
- Start charging fair market value for oil/gas lease and exploration rights on public lands.
- Guarantee tax exemption for any and all new forms of energy or energy generation for the five years immediately following patent approval.
Personally I am an advocate of nuclear power. Pebble bed reactors are clean, safe and can take advantage of economies of scale. Somebody (GE, probably) has developed a "disposable" reactor that is comparitively maintenance free, designed as a free-standing generator that can be placed in a village. At the end of its 20-25 year lifespan it is trucked away, waste and all (which is not removed from the structure while on-site) and a new one dropped in its place.Unquestionably. Restrictive covenants are quite common and are probably applied to every modern, newly constructed subdivision. The developer will sell you a house and lot but the deed would clearly stipulate that this lot will forever be subject to the rules of the homeowners' association, will never be subdivided and specify that no shed can be placed on the rearmost 15 feet of your lot set aside for the utility easement. I know of one subdivision going up where all house plans must be approved by the HOA and there is a minimum $/sq ft required to build. If you buy the land the deed clearly states that you must begin construction within x months or you must forfeit the lot. You have a choice: buy the lot and accept the restrictions written into the deed or don't buy the lot.
The same concept could easily be applied to software: rather than selling the right to use the software you should be considered to be purchasing a copy of the software to use as you see fit so long as you abide by the agreements entered into upon purchase. In many ways this would help protect the software producers more than the license-to-use model does.
Are you advocating demands that Apple Records provide free music DVDs to everybody who bought Yellow Submarine on 8 Track? If I bought a copy of Ping (book about the duck) and go blind am I entitled to a free copy on tape?
Now on to my real points.
1. This clown needs to be prosecuted for DMCA violations. Not only did he circumvent DRM but he told everybody else how to do it. This blatant recommendation of a tool is nothing short of advocating the theft of copyrighted material.
Unreasonable? Yes, but will the law. It is only through the prosecution of people like this will they start to advocate reasonable positions on DRM. It is the easiest thing in the world to advocate enforcing laws when you aren't subjected to them yourself (which is why Congress and the President have no real incentive to fix social security, for example). If this guy is sued with the same zeal as grandmothers who have 15 year old visitors who installed kazaa on that newfangled box then maybe there would be a louder voice calling for reason.
2. With regards to backup, so long as there exists a legal right to back up digital works (as there should be) then -no- DRM is acceptable for the very reasons mentioned by the OP. If the companies force DRM onto their product then they should be forced to provide replacement media, for free, on demand in perpetuity. The concept of "you don't own the copy of the song you only license it" is BS: the copyright holders can sell you the song with any restrictions they like, just as I can sell you a 5 acre parcel of land with a deeded restriction that you can never build more than a single house.
But so long as people like this guy can advocate DRM yet violate it on whim without consequence and as long as people are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for something with which they are not completely satisfied then nothing will change . Ever. There is no motivation for the companies to do so, so they will not.
True story: a car was stolen and a credit card fell into the wrong hands. The bad guy immediately started making charges all over town, including large ticket items that were delivered to a physical residence and signed for. The police response: "Sorry, there's nothing we can do."
A stolen credit card: just another bit of background static in the everyday noise of crime.
Online crime: newsworthy event that leads to a politician's name plastered over the evening news in a "you'd better reelect me because I'm cracking down on crime" soundbite.
The real issue is "where does Microsoft want to go tomorrow"? Today they downgrade the recommendation on what to do with Claria. Microsoft revolves around the long-term strategy and to believe that this is one of the few times when one of their decisions isn't a stepping stone towards something else is to take the bet on the horse with the longest odds on the field.
You miss the point. Actually, you miss a few of them, though I can not determine if you are intentionally missing the points or honestly fail to understand the specifics of this situation.
But first, let me make my position regarding end users of technology perfectly clear:
The end user is responsible for knowing how his device functions and is responsible for using said device in a manner consistent with his own personal wishes.
If you don't agree with this, then you may as well stop reading now: people who excuse any combination of ignorance, voluntary stupidity, ineptness, sloth, failure to read and at least attempt to comprehend instructions and/or accept the natural consequences of deliberate actions are of no concern to me. If you tolerate, exuse, endorse or participate in any of the above then in a nutshell I don't care what you have to think.
There are two parties involved here: we'll call them Q (the tech-saavy homeowner) and Pon, the Mensa-qualifier who thought that sitting in front of the guy's house for hours on end was a stroke of brilliance.
Let's examine the actions (or lack thereof) of Q first.
Q buys a wireless access point. According to my standards at this point he willingly assumes responsibility for configuring and operating the device according to his own personal wishes, desires, fetishes, dreams, schemes, wants, needs and lusts . Q installed his device and knowingly and admittedly operated the device with the following paremeters:
- Said device would advertise its presence to any and all devices equipped and configured to receive such advertisements
- Said device would provide internet connectivity upon demand to any and all devices upon request This operation was consistent with the design and configuration of this and all similar devices. It is clearly documented and well-known that any person who does not accept these parameters of operation must perform a few token and trivial operations. Q admitted that he was aware of this need and that he understood how to perform these steps, yet made a conscious decision to allow his access point open and available for public use. His claim that most of his neighbors were elderly does not preclude the possibility of any of them buying a computer and connecting to his network, a decidedly non-zero probability.
So we have the following:
1. Q admitted knowing that his AP is designed to advertise network availability
2. Q admitted knowing that his AP offered the advertised network availability and provided it upon request by any and all devices so equipped
3. Q admitted knowing that he could deny general, public access at any time and with intention and deliberation aforethought declined to provide any indication to any party that he wished to use this device in any manner other than initially configured.
So where is the theft?
There was no physical trespass. Pon was in a private vehicle in a public place. The invitation to connect to Q's network was knowingly and intentionally broadcast over public, unallocated frequencies with the explicit (and confirmed) knowledge and permission of Q. Q knowingly and deliberately plugged in a device that actively solicited general and public connections. I can only rephrase this so many different ways - the situation is clear: Q knew that his AP was designed to actively invite any and all devices to connect to his network and knowingly and intentionally made no effort to prevent his device from doing so, even though the steps to do so are trivial and within his ability to accomplish.
It is painfully clear that there was no theft - there was, however, acceptance of an offer.
Many, if not most SKYWARN groups use amateur radio to coordinate severe weather verification with the national weather service.
Here in Michigan amateur radios operators are used to verify that the tornado sirens work.
All hospitals are being equipped with shortwave radios for use during states of general emergency. During the big blackout the cell phone networks were a) overloaded then b) dead as the reserve power units ran out of juice.
Amateur operators routinely provide assistance during major events such as bike-a-thons, or the Woodward Dream Cruise
Amateur operators routinely carry traffic to/from disaster-struck areas worldwide. As I type this emergency nets are ready to get information into and out of hurricane stricken areas.
Amateur radio is the original version of the chat room and continues to serve this purpose
Many of the advancements in satellite communication were helped by experimenting amateurs - the original homebrew movement.
Amateur radio continues to serve a valuable purpose and definitely has a place in this world. For those seeking a technical challenge beyond executing a kiddie's scripts I suggest you attempt to pass your license exam and try to make even a single connection via packet or microwave.
TFA:
IE Smith was charged for war driving. Period. There is NO indication that he performed ANY illegal activities other than allowing his computer to respond to an invitation to connect to the network that was sent by the AP.
More from TFA:
If you have further information, please provide. If you don't, then don't ask people to RTFA to ascertain information that simply isn't there.
Unfortunately Yahoo! is extremely tolerant of spammers. One of their merchants has been spamming me for years and proudly had Yahoo! merchant logos all over their site. Repeated requests to both the merchant and Yahoo! were ignored and the spam continued.
I don't do business with spammers or their partners.