1) HDTV is not double-wide, it's 6Mhz like everything else.
2) 6Mhz is less than a lot of other services, it's just that it looks like a lot because most frequency charts are logrithmic, and VHF/UHF is near the bottom.
If you change the last three characters of the URL to pdf, you will see the pdf version, likewise with txt. I'm not sure why the story submitter chose to link to the word version.
Every official release from the FCC is in all three formats.
There is no authentication on ECFS, it's entirely possible that this comment was not truely submitted by Phil Lelyveld or that it is the SAME Phil Lelyveld. Given how poorly that comment is written, I would tend to guess it was an imposter trying to undermine his own statements.
Secondly, the FCC is intelligent enough to ignore this type of comment.
Finally, if someone were an employee of company X, but were not speaking officially on behalf of said company, it would not be proper for them to list the name of the company or their position within it. If this was the real Phil Levyveld, and he was being serious, his comment is much better posted as a semi-anonymous citizen than with the name Disney attached to it.
It's a good idea to initially give one thumb up to shows you regularly watch. Let TiVo give you some suggestions. If it starts suggesting shows you don't want to watch, give those shows thumbs down.
On my TiVo, there are probably about a dozen shows with 1 thumb down, a whole bunch with 1 thumb up, and maybe 6 that have 2 thumbs up. Tivo hasn't recorded something I don't like in almost a year, but it does occasionally pick out something I've never heard of that is cool.
CFC is for federal employees only. However, many companies have a payroll deduction arrangement with the United Way, which works very much the same way (although the United Way does have some overhead that the CFC doesn't).
Exactly what I did. Some additional benefits of giving trough the CFC is that the undesignated funds collected by your agency get allocated proportionally to designated agencies. In other words, you give more to EFF than just your donation.
I recently heard the CEO of Sony America give a speech, and one of the things he did, amazingly, was acknowledge that CD prices are far too high and that is contributing to the decreased sales. I believe the exact quote was "You know we have a problem when it costs more to buy a CD than a DVD."
He also made some other statements that astonished me, supporting fair use, at least as long as Sony products were used... but it's a start. He mentioned copy protected CDs as a reality, but said that he wanted to find a solution that only keeps down the rampant copying over the internet, not your ability to make a copy to play in your car or create a mix MD for your girlfriend.
Sony isn't going to stand up for consumer rights, but their profit motives do tend to coincide fairly frequently.
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Patrick Henry was not talking about compromising everyone's safety for liberty, only about his willingness to put his life on the line for it.
He was also talking about a specific type of injustice, and not saying that liberty is an absolute. In the real world, there are obligations and greater goods that fall into gray areas, and it is a useful question to ask how much we are willing to die for our sense of liberty.
For example, most of us believe that metal detectors and x-rays at airports are a reasonable security measure, at the expense of a little privacy and speed. Most of us don't believe it's okay to have 24-hour police video surveillance in our own bedrooms to make sure they can catch any criminal activity that may occur there.
There is a line that needs to be drawn. I'm not sure I trust the general population to make that decision for me, particularly right after a tragedy that strikes fear into them. However, someone has to draw that line, and it moves all the time. I just hope it moves back about as much as it moves forward.
Nonsense. If you racially profile, you enhance your odds of catching criminals.
No, you don't. I hate to beat the sniper drum because people are making such a big deal out of it, but it is true that the snipers were observed near the scene of several of the shootings by the police, but not noticed because the police were on the lookout for white separatists, and black muslims don't fit that profile.
Had no such profiling been done and they had instead simply compared license plates or people, they may have caught on to them earlier. Or maybe not, but clearly having the contrary profile in that case did not make their job any easier.
There are many levels of people who wish to copy music. These range from casual copier to hobbyist to professional pirate. The copy protection barely needs to exist to keep the causual copier from copying on his own. No amount of copy protection will keep the professional pirate away, but laws are pretty effective at keeping him at bay.
It's the hobbyist that the content producers need to look out for. There are far too many of them to lock up, and all it takes is a few to put the music on the internet so all of the casual copiers no longer have a barrier to copying. I've seen completely non-technical people who are afraid of computers figure out how to use Kazaa or Napster and start downloading music.
So copy protection needs to be effective enough that even the hobbyist decides it's not worth it to copy, and that's a pretty high barrier, most likely impossible.
The 60-hour Series 2 TiVo is $350 - $50 rebate from Best Buy, and probably any other electronics store. Without the subscription, you can still pause live TV, and record shows if you know the date and time. You lose the option to do season pass, thumbs up/down, suggestions, etc, but you do have better than VCR functionality anyway.
You are paying for the program guide, not the unit. Yes, TiVo makes the majority of its profits off the subscriptions, but it is not losing money on the units themselves.
Now, without the program guide, you lose most of the features that make TiVo great, but it's still a functional PVR, and at about the minimum cost you could make such a device for.
And the program guide has to cost money, because it costs TiVo a lot of money to prepare the information, provide dial-in phone lines, and fend off the Gemstar patent lawsuits.
Cell phone companies must hate that. One of the bigger problems with using cell phones in flight is due to roaming. Not only can your phone "see" many more cell towers than it was designed to see, but you are moving 10x faster than you would be driving. Handoffs are one of the hardest and most expensive things that a cell phone system can do. So you are using far more resources at 30,000 feet going 500mph than at ground level going 50. This explains why the calls were dropped, as the phone and network are not capable of handling this scenario very well.
1. For you to say "Patent Pending" you must have actually applied for the patent. 2. After you disclose it publically, as sci.crypt would most certainly qualify, you only have 1 years to patent it in the US, and you have ruled out the ability to patent it in many other countries. 3. Patenting it yourself with the help of a good book is better than disclosing it with the hope of patenting it later. 4. If you really want to see if it holds up, find a professor who researches cryptography, and discuss it with him. But be sure to make it clear to him (in writing) that this is for review only and is confidential.
Given the current laws, anyone speeding on a country road at 4AM should be given a ticket. It is the fact that police officers selectively enforce laws that make them so bad in the first place. If laws were enforced to the letter, to anyone violating them, there would be no more bad laws very quickly.
Imagine if everyone in Virginia who committed sodomy (defined as anal OR oral sex) was arrested and convicted of a felony. Imagine if everyone who didn't disassemble their car when being passed by a horse-drawn buggy in Pennsylvania were arrested. Imagine if everyone who made a mix CD of love songs for their high school crush were arrested.
These laws would be repealed, immediately. As some old dead white guy said (perhaps Franklin), "The best way to get rid of bad laws is to enforce them."
Unfortunately, the current way that laws are enforced means that police can selectively pick and choose who to arrest/fine for various crimes in order to keep the public relatively passive.
So yeah - computer enforcement of speeding laws is a good thing. Although, I am sorry for the first few million unfortunate drivers who will get fines before the law is repealed.
In the US, you have up to 1 year from date of first disclosure to when you can file for the patent. In other countries, Japan and the EU most notably, the second you disclose it publically it is impossible to patent it.
It doesn't take a formal non-disclosure agreement, but you do have to include a cover page explaining that it is confidential for review purposes only, etc, if you ever disclose it.
Of course, the best idea, especially considering that IANAL, is to just keep it secret, or clear any disclosures with a lawyer. And in general I really do reccomend a lawyer - although you can patent it yourself, there are enough reasons to get a lawyer to really make up for the few thousand you have to spend on one.
Except those 5% are presumably not being targeted by any of his competitors. Let's say this company has a 10% market share. Adding another 5% that are virtually guaranteed to go with him is actually a 50% increase in sales, which is well worth the 30% increase in development costs.
Let's put it another way... let's say that this 5% of customers will bring in $1million in profits to the company. This 30% extra development time will cost, say, $50,000 to the company? Which makes more sense?
When comparing percentages, it's always important to pay attention to what you're comparing to.
Most GSM phones can connect to a springboard slot (or pcmcia if you prefer) with a cable by Xircom [buy.com], some do IR, some bluetooth. With a GPRS phone you can just hook it up to your visor and voila. Alternatively you can use bluetooth (the only phone I know that this will work with is the Ericsson T39)
I think this solution is superior to getting a "SmartPhone" because you don't have to talk with the visor up to your ear and it's cheaper.
The real issue is vendor support. IBM is also moving from AIX to Linux. SGI will never convince Oracle to do an IRIX 6.5 port of their server, but SGI & IBM together can convince Oracle to do so. Same goes for other software pacakges. Sure, Maya and Alias will write their products for SGI's, but they want real commercial support.
The other issue is that they are trying to get workstations, this is where they are really losing to Sun. A company will go to Sun and SGI and say "We want a server and a bunch of workstations" and Sun has these nice $1000 SunBlades and what does SGI have to offer? Octanes? Even if they do get the hardware, they will scare everyone off because nothing runs on IRIX.
Actually, 6 words really isn't all that much. If you have 500 students for 10 years writing on the same subject, you are highly likely to have a few 6-word phrases be the same. There just aren't that many ways to describe the cause of the Civil War, or the tone of 1984, or the application of Turing's writings to modern computing. Then again, I'm sure he was not going on single matchings of 6-word phrases, but multiple occurances of the same.
Now, I'm not sure that the "corrective feedback mechanism" necessarily worked, or students got better at embelishing to not be caught by a simple computer program, but that's another story.
-Alison, who is happy to be done with College finally...
There are a lot of women who read and frequently post on/. It's just that most of the time we don't go out of our way to remind people we're women unless there's a good reason to.
-Alison, who also thinks that this is a very well thought out argument regardless of the gender of the author.
Until around 95-96 ish, the rule about 4-year accredited institutions was not in place. They were still somewhat selective, but high schools, school-related research centers, trade schools, etc could get.edu domains. They changed that, I assume, due to potential namespace collisions between the 3000 Thomas Jefferson schools in the country. Any new registration required a school to be a 4-year accredited institution. This could change, but I'd be surprised to see high schools and grade schools getting in there.
While fiber to the home is not necessary now, and may never be due to advances in wireless technologies, it does afford future expansion. Upgrading the 100Mbps box in the CO and the 45Mb backbone is much cheaper and easier than upgrading everyone's fiber to their home.
My university has very high quality cabling which was originally installed for 4Mbps token ring... was it really necessary to use such high quality cabling for such low speeds? No... but we're still using the same cabling at 100Mbps now.
It's just much easier to do the infrastructure "right" once.
Industry says "Well FCC, will you at least make the cable companies
carry the HDTV at no charge?"
Cable companies say "Fuck you! You gotta pay! Bwah-ha-ha-ha!"
FCC says "Yep, no federal mandated on HDTV must carry, we are letting
'the market' handle that"
You are incredibly accurate except for this point. Must-Carry is a clause that means that a Broadcast station can demand that a cable system must carry its channel up to a certain number of channels. Your local NBC affiliate is most certainly not demanding must-carry status on the cable company - it is getting paid by the cable company to be carried. No additional must-carry channels were set aside for HDTV, but NBC's HDTV channel could envoke must-carry if it really wanted to...
As 47 USC 534 reads, "a cable operator with more than 12 usable activated channels shall carry the signals of local commercial television stations up to one-third of the aggregate number of usable activated channels of such system." Later in the section it mentions that standards for transmission of "Advanced Television" signals will be established. Sounds to me that HDTV qualifies as "commerical television broadcast."
Slashdot Mirror
1) HDTV is not double-wide, it's 6Mhz like everything else.
2) 6Mhz is less than a lot of other services, it's just that it looks like a lot because most frequency charts are logrithmic, and VHF/UHF is near the bottom.
-Alison
How about trying PDF or text if you don't want the word version. In this case, the story submitter messed up, not the FCC.
-Alison
If you change the last three characters of the URL to pdf, you will see the pdf version, likewise with txt. I'm not sure why the story submitter chose to link to the word version.
Every official release from the FCC is in all three formats.
-Alison
There is no authentication on ECFS, it's entirely possible that this comment was not truely submitted by Phil Lelyveld or that it is the SAME Phil Lelyveld. Given how poorly that comment is written, I would tend to guess it was an imposter trying to undermine his own statements.
Secondly, the FCC is intelligent enough to ignore this type of comment.
Finally, if someone were an employee of company X, but were not speaking officially on behalf of said company, it would not be proper for them to list the name of the company or their position within it. If this was the real Phil Levyveld, and he was being serious, his comment is much better posted as a semi-anonymous citizen than with the name Disney attached to it.
-Alison
It's a good idea to initially give one thumb up to shows you regularly watch. Let TiVo give you some suggestions. If it starts suggesting shows you don't want to watch, give those shows thumbs down.
On my TiVo, there are probably about a dozen shows with 1 thumb down, a whole bunch with 1 thumb up, and maybe 6 that have 2 thumbs up. Tivo hasn't recorded something I don't like in almost a year, but it does occasionally pick out something I've never heard of that is cool.
-Alison
CFC is for federal employees only. However, many companies have a payroll deduction arrangement with the United Way, which works very much the same way (although the United Way does have some overhead that the CFC doesn't).
-Alison
Exactly what I did. Some additional benefits of giving trough the CFC is that the undesignated funds collected by your agency get allocated proportionally to designated agencies. In other words, you give more to EFF than just your donation.
-Alison
I recently heard the CEO of Sony America give a speech, and one of the things he did, amazingly, was acknowledge that CD prices are far too high and that is contributing to the decreased sales. I believe the exact quote was "You know we have a problem when it costs more to buy a CD than a DVD."
He also made some other statements that astonished me, supporting fair use, at least as long as Sony products were used... but it's a start. He mentioned copy protected CDs as a reality, but said that he wanted to find a solution that only keeps down the rampant copying over the internet, not your ability to make a copy to play in your car or create a mix MD for your girlfriend.
Sony isn't going to stand up for consumer rights, but their profit motives do tend to coincide fairly frequently.
-Alison
Here, I'll quote it for you:
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Patrick Henry was not talking about compromising everyone's safety for liberty, only about his willingness to put his life on the line for it.
He was also talking about a specific type of injustice, and not saying that liberty is an absolute. In the real world, there are obligations and greater goods that fall into gray areas, and it is a useful question to ask how much we are willing to die for our sense of liberty.
For example, most of us believe that metal detectors and x-rays at airports are a reasonable security measure, at the expense of a little privacy and speed. Most of us don't believe it's okay to have 24-hour police video surveillance in our own bedrooms to make sure they can catch any criminal activity that may occur there.
There is a line that needs to be drawn. I'm not sure I trust the general population to make that decision for me, particularly right after a tragedy that strikes fear into them. However, someone has to draw that line, and it moves all the time. I just hope it moves back about as much as it moves forward.
-Alison
Nonsense. If you racially profile, you enhance your odds of catching criminals.
No, you don't. I hate to beat the sniper drum because people are making such a big deal out of it, but it is true that the snipers were observed near the scene of several of the shootings by the police, but not noticed because the police were on the lookout for white separatists, and black muslims don't fit that profile.
Had no such profiling been done and they had instead simply compared license plates or people, they may have caught on to them earlier. Or maybe not, but clearly having the contrary profile in that case did not make their job any easier.
-Alison
There are many levels of people who wish to copy music. These range from casual copier to hobbyist to professional pirate. The copy protection barely needs to exist to keep the causual copier from copying on his own. No amount of copy protection will keep the professional pirate away, but laws are pretty effective at keeping him at bay.
It's the hobbyist that the content producers need to look out for. There are far too many of them to lock up, and all it takes is a few to put the music on the internet so all of the casual copiers no longer have a barrier to copying. I've seen completely non-technical people who are afraid of computers figure out how to use Kazaa or Napster and start downloading music.
So copy protection needs to be effective enough that even the hobbyist decides it's not worth it to copy, and that's a pretty high barrier, most likely impossible.
-Alison
The 60-hour Series 2 TiVo is $350 - $50 rebate from Best Buy, and probably any other electronics store. Without the subscription, you can still pause live TV, and record shows if you know the date and time. You lose the option to do season pass, thumbs up/down, suggestions, etc, but you do have better than VCR functionality anyway.
-Alison
You are paying for the program guide, not the unit. Yes, TiVo makes the majority of its profits off the subscriptions, but it is not losing money on the units themselves.
Now, without the program guide, you lose most of the features that make TiVo great, but it's still a functional PVR, and at about the minimum cost you could make such a device for.
And the program guide has to cost money, because it costs TiVo a lot of money to prepare the information, provide dial-in phone lines, and fend off the Gemstar patent lawsuits.
-Alison
Cell phone companies must hate that. One of the bigger problems with using cell phones in flight is due to roaming. Not only can your phone "see" many more cell towers than it was designed to see, but you are moving 10x faster than you would be driving. Handoffs are one of the hardest and most expensive things that a cell phone system can do. So you are using far more resources at 30,000 feet going 500mph than at ground level going 50. This explains why the calls were dropped, as the phone and network are not capable of handling this scenario very well.
-Alison
1. For you to say "Patent Pending" you must have actually applied for the patent.
2. After you disclose it publically, as sci.crypt would most certainly qualify, you only have 1 years to patent it in the US, and you have ruled out the ability to patent it in many other countries.
3. Patenting it yourself with the help of a good book is better than disclosing it with the hope of patenting it later.
4. If you really want to see if it holds up, find a professor who researches cryptography, and discuss it with him. But be sure to make it clear to him (in writing) that this is for review only and is confidential.
-Alison
Given the current laws, anyone speeding on a country road at 4AM should be given a ticket. It is the fact that police officers selectively enforce laws that make them so bad in the first place. If laws were enforced to the letter, to anyone violating them, there would be no more bad laws very quickly.
Imagine if everyone in Virginia who committed sodomy (defined as anal OR oral sex) was arrested and convicted of a felony. Imagine if everyone who didn't disassemble their car when being passed by a horse-drawn buggy in Pennsylvania were arrested. Imagine if everyone who made a mix CD of love songs for their high school crush were arrested.
These laws would be repealed, immediately. As some old dead white guy said (perhaps Franklin), "The best way to get rid of bad laws is to enforce them."
Unfortunately, the current way that laws are enforced means that police can selectively pick and choose who to arrest/fine for various crimes in order to keep the public relatively passive.
So yeah - computer enforcement of speeding laws is a good thing. Although, I am sorry for the first few million unfortunate drivers who will get fines before the law is repealed.
-Alison
In the US, you have up to 1 year from date of first disclosure to when you can file for the patent. In other countries, Japan and the EU most notably, the second you disclose it publically it is impossible to patent it.
It doesn't take a formal non-disclosure agreement, but you do have to include a cover page explaining that it is confidential for review purposes only, etc, if you ever disclose it.
Of course, the best idea, especially considering that IANAL, is to just keep it secret, or clear any disclosures with a lawyer. And in general I really do reccomend a lawyer - although you can patent it yourself, there are enough reasons to get a lawyer to really make up for the few thousand you have to spend on one.
-Alison
Except those 5% are presumably not being targeted by any of his competitors. Let's say this company has a 10% market share. Adding another 5% that are virtually guaranteed to go with him is actually a 50% increase in sales, which is well worth the 30% increase in development costs.
Let's put it another way... let's say that this 5% of customers will bring in $1million in profits to the company. This 30% extra development time will cost, say, $50,000 to the company? Which makes more sense?
When comparing percentages, it's always important to pay attention to what you're comparing to.
-Alison
Most GSM phones can connect to a springboard slot (or pcmcia if you prefer) with a cable by Xircom [buy.com], some do IR, some bluetooth. With a GPRS phone you can just hook it up to your visor and voila. Alternatively you can use bluetooth (the only phone I know that this will work with is the Ericsson T39)
I think this solution is superior to getting a "SmartPhone" because you don't have to talk with the visor up to your ear and it's cheaper.
The real issue is vendor support. IBM is also moving from AIX to Linux. SGI will never convince Oracle to do an IRIX 6.5 port of their server, but SGI & IBM together can convince Oracle to do so. Same goes for other software pacakges. Sure, Maya and Alias will write their products for SGI's, but they want real commercial support.
The other issue is that they are trying to get workstations, this is where they are really losing to Sun. A company will go to Sun and SGI and say "We want a server and a bunch of workstations" and Sun has these nice $1000 SunBlades and what does SGI have to offer? Octanes? Even if they do get the hardware, they will scare everyone off because nothing runs on IRIX.
-Alison
Actually, 6 words really isn't all that much. If you have 500 students for 10 years writing on the same subject, you are highly likely to have a few 6-word phrases be the same. There just aren't that many ways to describe the cause of the Civil War, or the tone of 1984, or the application of Turing's writings to modern computing. Then again, I'm sure he was not going on single matchings of 6-word phrases, but multiple occurances of the same.
Now, I'm not sure that the "corrective feedback mechanism" necessarily worked, or students got better at embelishing to not be caught by a simple computer program, but that's another story.
-Alison, who is happy to be done with College finally...
There are a lot of women who read and frequently post on /. It's just that most of the time we don't go out of our way to remind people we're women unless there's a good reason to.
-Alison, who also thinks that this is a very well thought out argument regardless of the gender of the author.
Until around 95-96 ish, the rule about 4-year accredited institutions was not in place. They were still somewhat selective, but high schools, school-related research centers, trade schools, etc could get .edu domains. They changed that, I assume, due to potential namespace collisions between the 3000 Thomas Jefferson schools in the country. Any new registration required a school to be a 4-year accredited institution. This could change, but I'd be surprised to see high schools and grade schools getting in there.
-Alison
While fiber to the home is not necessary now, and may never be due to advances in wireless technologies, it does afford future expansion. Upgrading the 100Mbps box in the CO and the 45Mb backbone is much cheaper and easier than upgrading everyone's fiber to their home.
My university has very high quality cabling which was originally installed for 4Mbps token ring... was it really necessary to use such high quality cabling for such low speeds? No... but we're still using the same cabling at 100Mbps now.
It's just much easier to do the infrastructure "right" once.
-Alison
You are incredibly accurate except for this point. Must-Carry is a clause that means that a Broadcast station can demand that a cable system must carry its channel up to a certain number of channels. Your local NBC affiliate is most certainly not demanding must-carry status on the cable company - it is getting paid by the cable company to be carried. No additional must-carry channels were set aside for HDTV, but NBC's HDTV channel could envoke must-carry if it really wanted to...
As 47 USC 534 reads, "a cable operator with more than 12 usable activated channels shall carry the signals of local commercial television stations up to one-third of the aggregate number of usable activated channels of such system." Later in the section it mentions that standards for transmission of "Advanced Television" signals will be established. Sounds to me that HDTV qualifies as "commerical television broadcast."
-nosilA