I don't think people have any idea what they're in for. Americans have never experienced 3rd world like conditions in over 150 years.
And they won't either. it doesn't matter a whole lot if the US economy suffers a total meltdown, for two reasons.
One, the US is the worlds largest consumer. If their economy suffers a meltdown, the whole earth will cascade down as a result. Moving to Cole won't help you out much, guess where most of their exposts go?
Two, even if such a thing happens, a poor economy does not make real-world assets vanish. No matter what happens to the economy, the US still has the worlds most powerful military. If they were in bad enough shape, I am sure they could just recall all their guys from abroad and take whatever resources they needed from smaller resource-rich nations by force or intimidation.
Maybe I'm just completely "out of the loop" so to speak, but I really can't understand how all these cities can A) justify and B) afford to offer all this free wireless internet access.
In my city at least (we have had free 802.11g WiFi over large swaths of the city for two years now, and they are constantly expanding it), it is easy to justify.
The city installed lots of fibre in the late 90's to future infrastructure, and much of it was just lying there, dark. Why not light it up? This cost is minimal
The cost of installing all the WAP's is offset by how much the city itself uses it. For example, the whole downtown is blanketed, so parking meter attendants can easily upload their tickets into the main system. Lots of other city employees use it for other uses as well.
It attracts business and travellers to the area. Being able to sit at any coffee bar downtown and use free WiFi is a huge draw.
As well, the city leases out the high speed fibre ring to companies, since they can do it cheaper than the local ISPs in many situations. Last I heard, the city was very well into the black on the whole project, it is far from a money-losing thing.
Being devil's advocate here... how is it allowable for a city government to basically destroy the market for local Internet access? I mean, aren't the people who say it's illegal government competition basically correct? It does take away any motive to pay for Internet access, right?
Wrong. No company is going to depend on public WiFi for it's internet backbone. For one, performance is suceptible to the weather, and also the number of people on the local node. As well, it is inherently not as secure as a landline (since the access is free and public, there is no WEP involved). Also, anyone who is security conscious would not use it even for their day-to-day use.
But it is great for surfing the web, or doing company business over a VPN. Personally, I love it. And since it actually *makes* the city money, thus lowering my tax burden, I love it even more.
You can already do all this with GoToMyPC.com, and i t is much simpler to use and more featureful.
Stupid TV commercials aside, it is a good product.
And as well, Remote Assistance in XP is already there and free. And it will open holes in your router via UPNP automatically if it needs to, and will email or IM a link to you to click on. It is very slick and reasonably secure, and from your description in paragraph two, I can see you have never used it, since with it "you never have to leave the phone", or "spend 15 minutes setting up software".
Anyways, my point still stands that FogCreek knowingly entered a crowded market segment very late in the game, they either need something head and shoulders above everyone else, or they will fail miserably. And Copilot certainly does not fit the bill.
You'd probably have a harder time getting cutting open a box, removing the product, hunting down the tag, ans swapping it, all by the security cameras, than discreetly sticking on a barcode.
Their goal turned out to be the creation of a piece of software later called Fog Creek Copilot, which would help techies fix customers' or relatives' computers by giving them remote access to the ailing machines.
Great idea! Take an ideathatalreadyexists, in several variations, and create yet another incompatible implementation. When it fails, you can always fall back on the movie!
If it doesn't happen often, why would a store put in a permanent fix for the problem?
They already have. It's called RFID. If you have been around this site for the past two years, you've probably heard of it.
It's much harder to forge an RFID tag unless you have the private key of the transmitter, or have some high-tech spy equipment that can capture the entire negotiation stream between the transmitter and target to crack it later... and the cost of doing either of these things would be prohibitive to anyone who wants to make money off shoplifting (you'd be better off planning a bank robbery).
If a qubit has 4 states, shouldn't a qubyte just be two qubits?
I mean if the switch to quantium computing means a totally different way of talking about how data is measured, that will cause a lot of confusion and mayhem in the market.
These are different activites
on
Hooked On The Web
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...spend hours online each day, surfing the Web, trading stocks, instant messaging or blogging...
How can you lump every activity that can be done online and somehow classify it as an addiction?
If I trade stocks over the phone, talk on the phone, and orde rpizza on the phone, does that mean I am addicted to the phone? How is it any different?
I think someone is just trying to drum up some business.
To me, any work that requires creative thinking and stirrs up emotion, is art. Anything that does not, is not.
Brave New World is Art. Citizen Kane is art. Casablanca is art.
Pearl Harbour? That is not art. It is an escape, sure, but it is not art.
Same with games. Quake 3 is art. Mario Kart is not.
Sure, there is art in the game, obviously (the characters, etc). But the work as a whole is not art unless it evokes some kind of emotional presence.
Now, art is subjective. Just because Pearl Harbour does not evoke an emotional response in me does not mean it would not in someone else. To that person, it is art.
Basically, the crux of it is, it doesn't matter WTF Roger Ebert or Ghandi or God himself thinks is art. All that matters is what is art to you?
If the courts rule that the 450 million dollar settlement is invalid, and that RIM has to stop selling blackberries, doesn't that mean that NTP will not get any money from them?
To me, this reads like NTP is going ot be losing out on 450 million dollars. Sure, RIM would be losing too, but my point is, how is this patent doing any good for NTP if they can't even legally license it to RIM?
Sure, they could maybe licens eit to some other company who will start useing it to make devices, but that would liekly never happen.
...one of the latest attempts to multitask common items, whether we want it or not.
... even frugal geeks can look smooth...
These are not for geeks, as can be shown by your idiodic comment (who "looks smooth" with a huge box attached to the side of your head?). They are for bikers, runners, and people involved in sports. They are not for a WOW playing geek in his mom's basement.
Ever try to bike through traffic while screwing around with a headphone cable? Probably not. If you did then you would see that there is a huge market for these kinds of devices.
"If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code."
Once again, all they need is to provide the link to kernel.org.
If they didn't modify the kernel, there is no need ot distibute the sources. Such a thing would just be a waste of everyone's time. It is both compliant with the letter and the spirit of the GPL.
Now if they *did* modify it, they need to provide that source. BUt that's a big assumption to make with such a standard appliance.
... and I see no reason why it wouldn't be (all the chips in this thing are likely pretty standard stuff), they could just point you at kernel.org
If you don't modify the original you don't have to distribute the source youself, you only have to distribute the source to any changes or derrivatives. See the GPL for details. Specifically:
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code.
This means all they need to do is provide a link to kernel.org
... that whenever a company buys a bunch of servers from say, Dell, and doesn't bother to specify on the order that some are Linux servers (since it doesn't save you any money for the hassle of making two orders, especially if you are using Debian or some non-supported distro anyway), they get counted towards *Windows* profits, even though they will be wiped as soon as they get to the company.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think people have any idea what they're in for. Americans have never experienced 3rd world like conditions in over 150 years.
And they won't either. it doesn't matter a whole lot if the US economy suffers a total meltdown, for two reasons.
One, the US is the worlds largest consumer. If their economy suffers a meltdown, the whole earth will cascade down as a result. Moving to Cole won't help you out much, guess where most of their exposts go?
Two, even if such a thing happens, a poor economy does not make real-world assets vanish. No matter what happens to the economy, the US still has the worlds most powerful military. If they were in bad enough shape, I am sure they could just recall all their guys from abroad and take whatever resources they needed from smaller resource-rich nations by force or intimidation.
Maybe I'm just completely "out of the loop" so to speak, but I really can't understand how all these cities can A) justify and B) afford to offer all this free wireless internet access.
In my city at least (we have had free 802.11g WiFi over large swaths of the city for two years now, and they are constantly expanding it), it is easy to justify.
As well, the city leases out the high speed fibre ring to companies, since they can do it cheaper than the local ISPs in many situations. Last I heard, the city was very well into the black on the whole project, it is far from a money-losing thing.
Being devil's advocate here ... how is it allowable for a city government to basically destroy the market for local Internet access? I mean, aren't the people who say it's illegal government competition basically correct? It does take away any motive to pay for Internet access, right?
Wrong. No company is going to depend on public WiFi for it's internet backbone. For one, performance is suceptible to the weather, and also the number of people on the local node. As well, it is inherently not as secure as a landline (since the access is free and public, there is no WEP involved). Also, anyone who is security conscious would not use it even for their day-to-day use.
But it is great for surfing the web, or doing company business over a VPN. Personally, I love it. And since it actually *makes* the city money, thus lowering my tax burden, I love it even more.
You can already do all this with GoToMyPC.com, and i t is much simpler to use and more featureful.
Stupid TV commercials aside, it is a good product.
And as well, Remote Assistance in XP is already there and free. And it will open holes in your router via UPNP automatically if it needs to, and will email or IM a link to you to click on. It is very slick and reasonably secure, and from your description in paragraph two, I can see you have never used it, since with it "you never have to leave the phone", or "spend 15 minutes setting up software".
Anyways, my point still stands that FogCreek knowingly entered a crowded market segment very late in the game, they either need something head and shoulders above everyone else, or they will fail miserably. And Copilot certainly does not fit the bill.
You'd probably have a harder time getting cutting open a box, removing the product, hunting down the tag, ans swapping it, all by the security cameras, than discreetly sticking on a barcode.
Their goal turned out to be the creation of a piece of software later called Fog Creek Copilot, which would help techies fix customers' or relatives' computers by giving them remote access to the ailing machines.
Great idea! Take an idea that already exists, in several variations, and create yet another incompatible implementation. When it fails, you can always fall back on the movie!
Oh well, they were only interns anyways.If it doesn't happen often, why would a store put in a permanent fix for the problem?
They already have. It's called RFID. If you have been around this site for the past two years, you've probably heard of it.
It's much harder to forge an RFID tag unless you have the private key of the transmitter, or have some high-tech spy equipment that can capture the entire negotiation stream between the transmitter and target to crack it later... and the cost of doing either of these things would be prohibitive to anyone who wants to make money off shoplifting (you'd be better off planning a bank robbery).
We all know this is just the first step of many to utilizing artificial quantum singularities for power.
To Romulus, and onward!
If more usable energy comes out of that process than went in, the increase in CO2 in the environment has been reduced.
Wow, and we have violated the laws of themodynamics to boot!
Biodiesel really is amazing!If a qubit has 4 states, shouldn't a qubyte just be two qubits?
I mean if the switch to quantium computing means a totally different way of talking about how data is measured, that will cause a lot of confusion and mayhem in the market.
How can you lump every activity that can be done online and somehow classify it as an addiction?
If I trade stocks over the phone, talk on the phone, and orde rpizza on the phone, does that mean I am addicted to the phone? How is it any different?
I think someone is just trying to drum up some business.
If you are reading a slashdot article about being hooked on the web when you should be working, you may be hooked on the web.
Now, let me get back to work.
Oh wait, what's this about RIM??? (click)
To me, any work that requires creative thinking and stirrs up emotion, is art. Anything that does not, is not.
Brave New World is Art. Citizen Kane is art. Casablanca is art.
Pearl Harbour? That is not art. It is an escape, sure, but it is not art.
Same with games. Quake 3 is art. Mario Kart is not.
Sure, there is art in the game, obviously (the characters, etc). But the work as a whole is not art unless it evokes some kind of emotional presence.
Now, art is subjective. Just because Pearl Harbour does not evoke an emotional response in me does not mean it would not in someone else. To that person, it is art.
Basically, the crux of it is, it doesn't matter WTF Roger Ebert or Ghandi or God himself thinks is art. All that matters is what is art to you?
If the courts rule that the 450 million dollar settlement is invalid, and that RIM has to stop selling blackberries, doesn't that mean that NTP will not get any money from them?
To me, this reads like NTP is going ot be losing out on 450 million dollars. Sure, RIM would be losing too, but my point is, how is this patent doing any good for NTP if they can't even legally license it to RIM?
Sure, they could maybe licens eit to some other company who will start useing it to make devices, but that would liekly never happen.
... even frugal geeks can look smooth...
These are not for geeks, as can be shown by your idiodic comment (who "looks smooth" with a huge box attached to the side of your head?). They are for bikers, runners, and people involved in sports. They are not for a WOW playing geek in his mom's basement.
Ever try to bike through traffic while screwing around with a headphone cable? Probably not. If you did then you would see that there is a huge market for these kinds of devices.
Sorry, I don't understand - there are liberal sin the democratic party? Since when?
Again form the same link:
"If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code."
Once again, all they need is to provide the link to kernel.org.
If they didn't modify the kernel, there is no need ot distibute the sources. Such a thing would just be a waste of everyone's time. It is both compliant with the letter and the spirit of the GPL.
Now if they *did* modify it, they need to provide that source. BUt that's a big assumption to make with such a standard appliance.
If you don't modify the original you don't have to distribute the source youself, you only have to distribute the source to any changes or derrivatives. See the GPL for details. Specifically:
This means all they need to do is provide a link to kernel.org
... if you don't have that mode selected.
There are multiple modes, see screenshots.
Screenshots
Actually, since the version is in the distributable, it would be very unlikely that the md5sums are the exact same between them.
Besides, you should upgrade anyways, or else numerous web sites might mis-detect your version or something.
That is not a 'popup', it is a flash ad.
Install Flashblock. Use it for a week and you will not know how you lived without it.
They had to pre-order it, ship it cross-country, warehouse it, distribute it, and shelf it for god knows how long.
It cost them *at least* $2.
Once you get into hardware probably very few people will attempt it. Too risky.
I don't know what circles you travel in, but I don't know *anyone* who owns an Xbox that is not modded, and that is out of about 20 to 30 Xbox owners.
The benefits of modding (namely, XBMC and the ability to play backups) are just too great to *not* do it.
It will be the same for the 360 - a hardware mod chip will be out in a matter of weeks, and everyone and their dog will have one.
... that whenever a company buys a bunch of servers from say, Dell, and doesn't bother to specify on the order that some are Linux servers (since it doesn't save you any money for the hassle of making two orders, especially if you are using Debian or some non-supported distro anyway), they get counted towards *Windows* profits, even though they will be wiped as soon as they get to the company.
Plus, you have hassle free and rapid support from Microsoft, which is a comforting feature for corporate customers
Hassle-free? Rapid? Man I gotta get whatever these guys are smoking....
Every try to report a bug in a Microsoft product and get a fix? You'll likely be waiting on the order of months. That is, if you get a fix at all.