What I'm waiting for now is someone with time on their hands to build a crawler using this tool that goes around the internet and looks for "fake" images, producing some information about:
* generally: how many images are fake, and what are the statistics breakdown on.com,.net... etc by zone.
* what about the statistics on news sites? how about we have an action group that "keeps the bastards honest" by regularly running the tool across news, government and other important sites.
* how about porn images, what's the fake % there?
* how about a firefox plugin that automatically tests images as I'm browsing, and puts a watermark over those that it finds are fake.
Any more ideas?
Lots of great applications for this. Please write the tools ASAP.
"is there any scope for this ruling to be challenged"
There is always a route for appeal to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) - but like you say, it has to be an appeal based upon interpretation of the directive. Have any such avenues been mentioned?
"There could be some issues around patent infringements for existing parts, and I did not read their entire site but there could be some issues around patent ownership of the new part (if a new design)."
Not for older cars of course - patents would only last for 20 years (max) from filing/disclosure. There are also exceptions for "repair" and "private use" circumstances - these vary depending upon country you're in.
This is completely unprofessional. I don't like some of the lifestyle choices that my neighbour makes, but I don't take to slagging him off in public about it. If GPL is not good for PHP, then so what - GPL is good for other things, but not everything - witness the popularity of the BSD license.
"So, you seem to agree that your broad statements are incorrect."
They were not - why do you put words in my mouth.
"I'm arguing from the informed consumer position."
No you're not, you just think you are.
"From that position, I have no problem keeping my stuff running during a national emergency."
There you go again. What's fine for you as 1% of the population that has a UPS unit at home is not fine for the other 20% of the population to switch entirely to VOIP and ditch their POTS and don't have UPS and then end up with a problem.
"You are apparently arguing that first adopters of a new technology that are uninformed will have problems with it in certain circumstances."
Didn't you read my post, where I said something about "wider social perspective" ? It other words, not just for the first adopters?
"Yeah, and I have a UPS and my Internet connection is over DSL, so for my ability to do VoIP to go down, I'd have to be without power for hours, or there would have to be a problem at the phone company."
Sure, because like many of us, you're a jumped-up techie, and definitely in the minority. For the vast majority of people, we're talking about set-top boxes, DSL gateways, etc. All of these require domestic power and so on.
"If I get adequate cell service at my home, how does penetration and other such concerns affect me? "
Because we're not just talking about _you_. We're talking about the vast majority of people who are being "sold" VOIP as a "killer app", suggesting that they should ditch their POTS line, perhaps not aware of the consequences.
"So a cell phone may be a better choice than a land line."
I agree - cell phones and land lines are on par - but cell phone coverage is still not universal. There have been a couple of incidents where people have died or had emergency issues because they were in an out of coverage area. Granted, there was probably no land line there as well, but generally in rural areas, the land line coverage at least no worse than land lines.
''But your condescending and quite innacurate "Wrong again" quip is inflamitory and just plain ol' FUD. ''
You clearly don't understand the issues, which hardly gives you an ability to make those calls - I mean, look at your first statement "my UPS...", you're the one arguing from the elite technical position. If you want to understand the issues, take a wider social perspective, not "VOIP and me", but "VOIP and us".
"Please don't give people the idea that you need a rotary phone to have service during an outage. A $15, corded phone (without any "frills") will work as just as well."
The parent has a point: unfortunately we're engineers and understand this, but average people don't. So many people who have funky household cordless phone powered by the mains have bad luck during power outage, while standard handsets continue to work. Tell this to an average person they'll laugh. Wait until they have a blackout or someone dies because there's no way to make a call (well, in most cases, a neighbour could help) and then they'll take you seriously.
"This is just not true. POTS is only available wherever you pay to drag a line to it. There's no POTS service in my bathroom, in my backyard, in my garage, or on the about 1/4 mile trek to my mail box on on the trails through the Tonto National Forest behind my home."
This is such a stupid statement that it's obvious you are trolling.
Re:Put a battery in the VOIP box?
on
VoIP Questioned
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Couldn't you put a small-ish battery in the VOIP box and have it switch over in case of power failure?"
And how are you going to make sure people use the right type of boxes? Now we're taking FCC approval - all boxes certified to have backup operational mode that uses inbuilt cells or draws current from POTS.
Can you hear the outrage as industry and consumers are told that the FCC is going to regulate domestic CPE (customer premise equipment) to ensure HA and emergency capability?
Equally, can you hear the outrage when this doesn't happen, and we start to have reports of children dying because they couldn't get the 911 operator because VOIP was down because the little broadband wi-fi box was infected by a virus?
I don't know the answer - but these are some substantial roadblocks.
"If my VoIP doesn't work, chances are my POTS phones isn't working either."
Very wrong. Your VOIP can easily fail because of so many domestic conditions, while the telco easily continues to send you 48v + current in the local loop.
"If I needed to dial 911, I'd use my mobile phone rather than the POTS/VoIP one, because it's in my pocket all the time, I'd be able to get the call made faster. I don't see this being an issue for most people."
Wrong again: the penetration of mobile phones is woefully low, and actually of reasonable cost, and not entirely of wide enough coverage. On the other hand, POTS two wire is just about everywhere and entirely dead cheap and simple for everyone to use.
POTS is not going anywhere for a long time, even if its market share will decline.
Your 48v (?) POTS line continues to provide current during emergency because the telco has backup power supply: there's virtually no complexity on the user side (the phone is powered from the line, and analogue phones are dead simple and largely robust electromechanical device).
On the other hand, even if your telco can keep PPP up during an emergency, and even if the telco pulled out 911 VOIP at the exchange and routed it on high availability circuits to operators to minimise internetworking failures, you still have the horrendous problem at the user side: i.e. complex customer home equipment that runs off domestic power that has large number of failure modes.
Even mobiles are better in an emergency (i.e. handsets have portable power, and the basestation and infrastructure has emergency power + failover features).
So even if you get QoS and all other other things in place to make VOIP really work: how the hell are you going to ensure high availability?
Otherwise, VOIP is going to great for multimedia conferencing and everything else.
Someone should mod you up, because what you say is correct: while the copyright in the sound recording has expired, the copyright in the lyrics and the composition hasn't: meaning that if people start using the Elvis work without permission, then while the Elvis estate cannot do anything, the Crudup estate can (and, I'm sure they'd probably like to!).
"There's a fundamental principle in law called "retroaction"
There's also a principle called "statute of limitations", meaning that even if you committed a crime, there is an expiry period after which you cannot be prosecuted. The time periods vary depending upon severity of the crime. There may be no statute of limitations on murder, for example. In Australia, for example, some crimes expire after 6 months, or 10 years.
Would be interested to know the exact crime and limitation period that he is charged with.
I'm guessing that in the oppressive USA, there's no limitation on anything that's a felony.
"I am appalled at the number of people justifying what Oxford Univeristy is attempting to do. Have you heard of Whistleblowing, which I consider a fundamental service to any functioning democracy?"
Responsibility is the word. The courts will allow a "in the public interest" defence if you breach commercial confidentiality, but only to the extent that you deal with the information responsibility.
It's not very responsible to plaster the results over a paper that allows less-ethical jim and joe to go and repeat the same actions and do harm. It is responsible if you take the results and give them to the IT department so they can fix the problem. Then, if the IT department doesn't do anything about it within the next 3 months, you're probably safe making it public to put the pressure on. This is in fact a sort of "limited disclosure".
But it depends upon circumstances. In a UK case over faulty breathalysers, it was considered acceptable to plaster it over the media, because it was in the public interest and who else could you go to (the police?)?
I have no doubt that what they've done is actually self-serving and irresponsible - but then again, we're talking about students here, and it goes with the territory. The university has to take some action though, they can't just let students get away with this type of thing.
This would be outrageous and unacceptable for a commercial contract: i.e. you are the marketing department and you contract a photographer to take photographs for use in advertising material. No marketing person who wanted to keep their job would allow the photographer to retain any copyright in the photographs: under a work-for-hire arrangement, all copyrights would vest in the company paying the photographer. No commercial photographer who wanted to keep doing future business would try to hold onto the rights either.
The fact that wedding photographers try to change this, is entirely an attempt to milk further money from the customer, and needs to be stopped by actually resulting to hire photographers that operate this way.
The dangerous thing is that if you become famous in 10 years time, then the wedding photogapher (as the copyright owner) can - without your permission, depending upon the terms of your contract with him/her - sell your photographs for other purposes: possibly a tidy profit, without needing permission from you, nor needing to deliver any of that profit back to you.
Finally, just an important note: unless your contract with the photographer actually says that the photographer owns the copyright, then in fact, the default position under USC17 is that you as the commissioner own the copyright, not the photographer. So make sure you check the fine print in the contract, because the photographer may be making claims that are not legally correct.
I would argue that you shouldn't put too much effort into making software that you think will last 200 years, because in 10 years time, you'll find that a technological change completely invalidates fundamental design/architectural/etc assumptions, and thus your software goes out the window.
The best you can ever do is write software for a shortish horizon, i.e. a couple of decades or so.
I mean, if anyone could predict what software would last 200 years, then please contact me because I want your help in betting on the stock market:-).
Technologies change, either incrementally, disruptively, etc. One quote I remember from Lucent was "we knew the internet was coming, we just didn't know that it'd be like this". Who can predict that a specific protocol, or a specific topological approach or a specific standard will be the direction of the future?
Designing for 200 years lifetime is basically science fiction: possibly interesting and entertaining, and illustrating some moral or technical dilemas, but ultimately to be obsolete when the real future comes around.
I think the subject line says it all. You can't worry about your software working for that long until your hardware can last that long.
Not really true: just look at the Commodore 64 emulators. In a 100 years, the hardware may be long gone, but the emulators will likely survive as a continuing curiosity - because as pure software they can either be ported to new environments, or run as emulator within emulator (e.g. run old x86 C64 emulator within old x86 emulator recursively).
As the capability of hardware goes forward, then it becomes feasible to emulate yesterday's hardware in today's software: this is just what the C64 emulators do (i.e. 1mhz cpu). In 50 years, it'll probably be a cinch (and, I'm guessing, it will be some university student's fun hack of a project) to emulate an entire Playstation 3 and "retro-game" with it on his future deck.
The issue here is not about whether it's hardware or software, it's about whether documentation is available: i.e. "is it open".
If you want a good example of survivable software and data, just look at the emulators for old 8/16bit computers, e.g. the Commodore 64 emulators. They faithfully reproduce the entire machine, allowing any of the old software to be used without a problem. Even in 200 years time, these old C64 emulators will be around as a curiosity, in the same way that early "flip card" cinema machines are found in museums.
You can't compare software engineering with either mechnical engineering or civil engineering, in the same way you generally can't compare any of the engineering professions with each other - but what they do all share, is a common underlying concern for attributes such as reliability, maintainability, risk management, structural integrity, and so on.
This type of news item is not interesting any more. Every business operating on a Unix like operating system has a plan to move to Linux - it's just a matter of time (mission critical businesses don't just take a huge risk [despite the cost saving] and jump to a new O/S until they are really really really sure there will be no problems.
``and maybe it is strange: according to the article many would say ARM is a monopolist, but you never hear anyone say 'ARM sucks!'. But then again, why would they?"``
It's not strange at all: consumers and end users know little nor care little about the embedded processor, and frankly, the choice of embedded processor has little if any impact on the end user.
There are many other monopolies in various parts of society that people don't get worked up about.
"but let me be the one to say what a friggin' complete waste of time."
I don't think so: what he's doing actually raises social and cultural awareness: coffee stores may not be the grandest thing in the scheme of the planet, but it gives some real insight into life as it is today - rather than through the eyes of a glossy travel magazine or some other trumped up "we only photograph the monuments" book. At the end of the day, it's all of these little things that tell us a lot about how the world is moving along around us.
Just to clarify: the point about the regulation is that while it ensures you can have recieving antenna mounted, it doesn't give you the right to install it: the estates management can require you use a professional, and can place some restrictions on where the antenna is mounted (e.g. the rooftop may have a space allocated for antenna mounts, and the estates management will require the installer to put it there, and to run the cable all the way to your apartment, even if it is a long cable run).
I live in a converted victorian building on the top floor apartment. Monkeys from the 2nd floor decided to climb on the roof one day and install their own antenna, complete with cable that was just strung over the edge and not fastened.
I promptly called the estates management. In the next few weeks, they'd come around to confirm it, then later, the tenants had been evicted and the antenna was removed.
Good thing to. Last thing I want is (a) some shoddly mounted antenna swinging over and into my window during a blustery storm (and it does get blustery here), (b) water seeping in the roof through god-knows what mounting they used, (c) a roof full of nasty looking antennas.
(This was a satellite antenna - the building already has communal TV antenna with amplifier that works a charm).
Morale of the story? Do check your tenancy (whether short or long term) agreement.
Slashdot Mirror
What I'm waiting for now is someone with time on their hands to build a crawler using this tool that goes around the internet and looks for "fake" images, producing some information about:
* generally: how many images are fake, and what are the statistics breakdown on
* what about the statistics on news sites? how about we have an action group that "keeps the bastards honest" by regularly running the tool across news, government and other important sites.
* how about porn images, what's the fake % there?
* how about a firefox plugin that automatically tests images as I'm browsing, and puts a watermark over those that it finds are fake.
Any more ideas?
Lots of great applications for this. Please write the tools ASAP.
"is there any scope for this ruling to be challenged"
There is always a route for appeal to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) - but like you say, it has to be an appeal based upon interpretation of the directive. Have any such avenues been mentioned?
"There could be some issues around patent infringements for existing parts, and I did not read their entire site but there could be some issues around patent ownership of the new part (if a new design)."
Not for older cars of course - patents would only last for 20 years (max) from filing/disclosure. There are also exceptions for "repair" and "private use" circumstances - these vary depending upon country you're in.
This is completely unprofessional. I don't like some of the lifestyle choices that my neighbour makes, but I don't take to slagging him off in public about it. If GPL is not good for PHP, then so what - GPL is good for other things, but not everything - witness the popularity of the BSD license.
"So, you seem to agree that your broad statements are incorrect."
They were not - why do you put words in my mouth.
"I'm arguing from the informed consumer position."
No you're not, you just think you are.
"From that position, I have no problem keeping my stuff running during a national emergency."
There you go again. What's fine for you as 1% of the population that has a UPS unit at home is not fine for the other 20% of the population to switch entirely to VOIP and ditch their POTS and don't have UPS and then end up with a problem.
"You are apparently arguing that first adopters of a new technology that are uninformed will have problems with it in certain circumstances."
Didn't you read my post, where I said something about "wider social perspective" ? It other words, not just for the first adopters?
"To which, I can only answer, "Well, duh." "
You've proven yourself to be an idiot.
"Yeah, and I have a UPS and my Internet connection is over DSL, so for my ability to do VoIP to go down, I'd have to be without power for hours, or there would have to be a problem at the phone company."
...", you're the one arguing from the elite technical position. If you want to understand the issues, take a wider social perspective, not "VOIP and me", but "VOIP and us".
Sure, because like many of us, you're a jumped-up techie, and definitely in the minority. For the vast majority of people, we're talking about set-top boxes, DSL gateways, etc. All of these require domestic power and so on.
"If I get adequate cell service at my home, how does penetration and other such concerns affect me? "
Because we're not just talking about _you_. We're talking about the vast majority of people who are being "sold" VOIP as a "killer app", suggesting that they should ditch their POTS line, perhaps not aware of the consequences.
"So a cell phone may be a better choice than a land line."
I agree - cell phones and land lines are on par - but cell phone coverage is still not universal. There have been a couple of incidents where people have died or had emergency issues because they were in an out of coverage area. Granted, there was probably no land line there as well, but generally in rural areas, the land line coverage at least no worse than land lines.
''But your condescending and quite innacurate "Wrong again" quip is inflamitory and just plain ol' FUD. ''
You clearly don't understand the issues, which hardly gives you an ability to make those calls - I mean, look at your first statement "my UPS
"Please don't give people the idea that you need a rotary phone to have service during an outage. A $15, corded phone (without any "frills") will work as just as well."
The parent has a point: unfortunately we're engineers and understand this, but average people don't. So many people who have funky household cordless phone powered by the mains have bad luck during power outage, while standard handsets continue to work. Tell this to an average person they'll laugh. Wait until they have a blackout or someone dies because there's no way to make a call (well, in most cases, a neighbour could help) and then they'll take you seriously.
"This is just not true. POTS is only available wherever you pay to drag a line to it. There's no POTS service in my bathroom, in my backyard, in my garage, or on the about 1/4 mile trek to my mail box on on the trails through the Tonto National Forest behind my home."
This is such a stupid statement that it's obvious you are trolling.
"Couldn't you put a small-ish battery in the VOIP box and have it switch over in case of power failure?"
And how are you going to make sure people use the right type of boxes? Now we're taking FCC approval - all boxes certified to have backup operational mode that uses inbuilt cells or draws current from POTS.
Can you hear the outrage as industry and consumers are told that the FCC is going to regulate domestic CPE (customer premise equipment) to ensure HA and emergency capability?
Equally, can you hear the outrage when this doesn't happen, and we start to have reports of children dying because they couldn't get the 911 operator because VOIP was down because the little broadband wi-fi box was infected by a virus?
I don't know the answer - but these are some substantial roadblocks.
"If my VoIP doesn't work, chances are my POTS phones isn't working either."
Very wrong. Your VOIP can easily fail because of so many domestic conditions, while the telco easily continues to send you 48v + current in the local loop.
"If I needed to dial 911, I'd use my mobile phone rather than the POTS/VoIP one, because it's in my pocket all the time, I'd be able to get the call made faster. I don't see this being an issue for most people."
Wrong again: the penetration of mobile phones is woefully low, and actually of reasonable cost, and not entirely of wide enough coverage. On the other hand, POTS two wire is just about everywhere and entirely dead cheap and simple for everyone to use.
POTS is not going anywhere for a long time, even if its market share will decline.
Your 48v (?) POTS line continues to provide current during emergency because the telco has backup power supply: there's virtually no complexity on the user side (the phone is powered from the line, and analogue phones are dead simple and largely robust electromechanical device).
On the other hand, even if your telco can keep PPP up during an emergency, and even if the telco pulled out 911 VOIP at the exchange and routed it on high availability circuits to operators to minimise internetworking failures, you still have the horrendous problem at the user side: i.e. complex customer home equipment that runs off domestic power that has large number of failure modes.
Even mobiles are better in an emergency (i.e. handsets have portable power, and the basestation and infrastructure has emergency power + failover features).
So even if you get QoS and all other other things in place to make VOIP really work: how the hell are you going to ensure high availability?
Otherwise, VOIP is going to great for multimedia conferencing and everything else.
Someone should mod you up, because what you say is correct: while the copyright in the sound recording has expired, the copyright in the lyrics and the composition hasn't: meaning that if people start using the Elvis work without permission, then while the Elvis estate cannot do anything, the Crudup estate can (and, I'm sure they'd probably like to!).
"There's a fundamental principle in law called "retroaction"
There's also a principle called "statute of limitations", meaning that even if you committed a crime, there is an expiry period after which you cannot be prosecuted. The time periods vary depending upon severity of the crime. There may be no statute of limitations on murder, for example. In Australia, for example, some crimes expire after 6 months, or 10 years.
Would be interested to know the exact crime and limitation period that he is charged with.
I'm guessing that in the oppressive USA, there's no limitation on anything that's a felony.
"I am appalled at the number of people justifying what Oxford Univeristy is attempting to do. Have you heard of Whistleblowing, which I consider a fundamental service to any functioning democracy?"
Responsibility is the word. The courts will allow a "in the public interest" defence if you breach commercial confidentiality, but only to the extent that you deal with the information responsibility.
It's not very responsible to plaster the results over a paper that allows less-ethical jim and joe to go and repeat the same actions and do harm. It is responsible if you take the results and give them to the IT department so they can fix the problem. Then, if the IT department doesn't do anything about it within the next 3 months, you're probably safe making it public to put the pressure on. This is in fact a sort of "limited disclosure".
But it depends upon circumstances. In a UK case over faulty breathalysers, it was considered acceptable to plaster it over the media, because it was in the public interest and who else could you go to (the police?)?
I have no doubt that what they've done is actually self-serving and irresponsible - but then again, we're talking about students here, and it goes with the territory. The university has to take some action though, they can't just let students get away with this type of thing.
This would be outrageous and unacceptable for a commercial contract: i.e. you are the marketing department and you contract a photographer to take photographs for use in advertising material. No marketing person who wanted to keep their job would allow the photographer to retain any copyright in the photographs: under a work-for-hire arrangement, all copyrights would vest in the company paying the photographer. No commercial photographer who wanted to keep doing future business would try to hold onto the rights either.
The fact that wedding photographers try to change this, is entirely an attempt to milk further money from the customer, and needs to be stopped by actually resulting to hire photographers that operate this way.
The dangerous thing is that if you become famous in 10 years time, then the wedding photogapher (as the copyright owner) can - without your permission, depending upon the terms of your contract with him/her - sell your photographs for other purposes: possibly a tidy profit, without needing permission from you, nor needing to deliver any of that profit back to you.
Finally, just an important note: unless your contract with the photographer actually says that the photographer owns the copyright, then in fact, the default position under USC17 is that you as the commissioner own the copyright, not the photographer. So make sure you check the fine print in the contract, because the photographer may be making claims that are not legally correct.
I would argue that you shouldn't put too much effort into making software that you think will last 200 years, because in 10 years time, you'll find that a technological change completely invalidates fundamental design/architectural/etc assumptions, and thus your software goes out the window.
:-).
The best you can ever do is write software for a shortish horizon, i.e. a couple of decades or so.
I mean, if anyone could predict what software would last 200 years, then please contact me because I want your help in betting on the stock market
Technologies change, either incrementally, disruptively, etc. One quote I remember from Lucent was "we knew the internet was coming, we just didn't know that it'd be like this". Who can predict that a specific protocol, or a specific topological approach or a specific standard will be the direction of the future?
Designing for 200 years lifetime is basically science fiction: possibly interesting and entertaining, and illustrating some moral or technical dilemas, but ultimately to be obsolete when the real future comes around.
I think the subject line says it all. You can't worry about your software working for that long until your hardware can last that long.
Not really true: just look at the Commodore 64 emulators. In a 100 years, the hardware may be long gone, but the emulators will likely survive as a continuing curiosity - because as pure software they can either be ported to new environments, or run as emulator within emulator (e.g. run old x86 C64 emulator within old x86 emulator recursively).
As the capability of hardware goes forward, then it becomes feasible to emulate yesterday's hardware in today's software: this is just what the C64 emulators do (i.e. 1mhz cpu). In 50 years, it'll probably be a cinch (and, I'm guessing, it will be some university student's fun hack of a project) to emulate an entire Playstation 3 and "retro-game" with it on his future deck.
The issue here is not about whether it's hardware or software, it's about whether documentation is available: i.e. "is it open".
If you want a good example of survivable software and data, just look at the emulators for old 8/16bit computers, e.g. the Commodore 64 emulators. They faithfully reproduce the entire machine, allowing any of the old software to be used without a problem. Even in 200 years time, these old C64 emulators will be around as a curiosity, in the same way that early "flip card" cinema machines are found in museums.
You can't compare software engineering with either mechnical engineering or civil engineering, in the same way you generally can't compare any of the engineering professions with each other - but what they do all share, is a common underlying concern for attributes such as reliability, maintainability, risk management, structural integrity, and so on.
This type of news item is not interesting any more. Every business operating on a Unix like operating system has a plan to move to Linux - it's just a matter of time (mission critical businesses don't just take a huge risk [despite the cost saving] and jump to a new O/S until they are really really really sure there will be no problems.
``and maybe it is strange: according to the article many would say ARM is a monopolist, but you never hear anyone say 'ARM sucks!'. But then again, why would they?"``
It's not strange at all: consumers and end users know little nor care little about the embedded processor, and frankly, the choice of embedded processor has little if any impact on the end user.
There are many other monopolies in various parts of society that people don't get worked up about.
"Had the antenna stayed, it was much less likely the roof would leak.
Now there's probably 4 unsealed holes in it.
Sorry... but your solution probably didn't net you that gain."
Completely wrong assumptions there. Go back to school.
"but let me be the one to say what a friggin' complete waste of time."
I don't think so: what he's doing actually raises social and cultural awareness: coffee stores may not be the grandest thing in the scheme of the planet, but it gives some real insight into life as it is today - rather than through the eyes of a glossy travel magazine or some other trumped up "we only photograph the monuments" book. At the end of the day, it's all of these little things that tell us a lot about how the world is moving along around us.
Just to clarify: the point about the regulation is that while it ensures you can have recieving antenna mounted, it doesn't give you the right to install it: the estates management can require you use a professional, and can place some restrictions on where the antenna is mounted (e.g. the rooftop may have a space allocated for antenna mounts, and the estates management will require the installer to put it there, and to run the cable all the way to your apartment, even if it is a long cable run).
I live in a converted victorian building on the top floor apartment. Monkeys from the 2nd floor decided to climb on the roof one day and install their own antenna, complete with cable that was just strung over the edge and not fastened.
I promptly called the estates management. In the next few weeks, they'd come around to confirm it, then later, the tenants had been evicted and the antenna was removed.
Good thing to. Last thing I want is (a) some shoddly mounted antenna swinging over and into my window during a blustery storm (and it does get blustery here), (b) water seeping in the roof through god-knows what mounting they used, (c) a roof full of nasty looking antennas.
(This was a satellite antenna - the building already has communal TV antenna with amplifier that works a charm).
Morale of the story? Do check your tenancy (whether short or long term) agreement.