I just checked plans on Verizon, and they have a 4000 minute plan, with free nights/weekends for $149.99. That is basically unlimited, since your core minutes would only be used M-F, 6am - 9pm, which is roughly 4500 minutes. Considering "In" calling and the unlikelihood that your phone would be constantly "talking" 6am-9pm I would say one might even get away with 2000 minutes at $99.00. So in other words, wheres the news. Let me know when they claim unlimited plans for like $75.00/month.
And can someone explain the 6000 minute plan, maybe it is for people that can't do math??
Wouldn't it be cheaper if M$ just paid off any of the squatters? I mean the practice of registering domain names of trademarked names sounds like good ol' capitalism to me... If M$ thinks this is unethical or whatever, ha! Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black.
Seems like a great front for a Man in The Middle attack, except that rather then setting up tons of fake ARP packets you get people to come to your site. Brilliant!
Why not just use the coffee shop in the town next to you, and reprogram your MAC address to.
Well, I am not one for arguing for big business, but it's their network. They don't want to impose hard limits but reserve the right to maintain quality of service. We have all been pissed off sitting there trying to check a quick email only to get the "thinking" status from the browser followed by a timeout error. So, as TFA says: You look at it and see there's some two to three people in the neighborhood or a college dorm . . . and what they're doing is impairing the customer experience for the rest of the people off that node," Davis said. "Then it's a business decision: Do you alienate a small percentage of customers to make your other customers happy?"
If you have 25 customers pissed off because their $50/month broadband service is constantly slow, and 1 or 2 other people are constantly downloaded 300GB worth of data per month, what would you do? The problem, I am sure is that the situation was not handled with tact and reason. It was probably handled by some schmo customer rep who was like, "naaa, you just download too much, we just can't have that." If a nice polite person got on the phone and explained it just as the guy in the article, then people might be a little more understanding, and if not, tell them to go buy their own T3 line.
OK, this isn't really GPS. It is more like RNAV that is used by planes. I.e. A VHF navaid broadcasts a signal and a receiver measures the signal and uses the Navaids known position to calculate the vector to the receiver thus providing a position estimate. Not saying this isn't cool, but why is GPS even mentioned? The beacon on the ocean floor could simply be surveyed, much like GPS datums, and it's position would just be known. Then build a navigation database, much like the airplanes use, that subs could use.
If digital cameras did some sort of "unbreakable" digital signature via steganography or checksum or something when pictures were snapped. In this day and age I think that would be great. You snap a picture, and bam the pixels are embedded with something such that an alterations to the picture could be detected.
allows its users to discuss, criticize, and attack other law students and lawyers by name.
There is a fine line between expressing one's opinion and slander. IANAL, but if I would bet some of the free speech will cross into the "communication of a statement that makes a false claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may harm the reputation of an individual, business, product, group, government or nation." (wikipedia).
Won't it be ironic if lawyers discussing lawsuits start slandering each other on a lawyer based blog and end up suing each other.
I deployed this strategy and it worked quite well. I was developing requirements for a UI on a flight system for the function of flight planning. I traveled a lot with our company plane and road "shotgun" a lot. I started bringing my notepad and jotting down what the pilot was doing with respect to flight planning. I also made several notes on the most common buttons and scenarios based upon what Air Traffic Control was telling the pilot. I flew in good weather, bad weather, heavy traffic, and light traffic. After about one or two months I went back to our spec and said, this is all wrong. The widgets here and here are "cool" from a programmers perspective but the pilots will be annoyed by this. I also made several suggestions to the radio team because one of the most common tasks the pilot did was change communication frequencies for radio navaids and ATC operators. I got a lot of flac for my suggestions, to the tune of mind your own UI, this is what the customer was shown and this is what they are going to get.
Anyway, my point is, it can work, and probably for more applications than you would initially think. It might just take a little, I hate to say it, "out of the box" thinking.
Your problem is not unique. I attend an Extreme Programming workshop near where I live and a guy by the name of Richard Sheridan came to do a presentation on his companies technique called High Tech Anthropology. It was a great presentation and it is something you might try. Basically, you camp out in the users "Den" and observe them, taking notes and trying to understand how they work, what buttons they push, which user interfaces frustrate them, which things they like, etc. You then take this back and use it to publish your requirements specs. Some XP enthusiasts talk about bringing the customer in and having them work with them team, but Richard Sheridan makes a great point, that this can sometime lead to the users becoming more like engineers rather than the other way around (like the book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum).
NASA is tracking an asteroid, that could hit the earth in 2036. OF course by "could" NASA means 1:45,000. Still, why is the US the only country tasked with worrying about this. Hopefully the members of the UN wake up and smell the asteroid!
I tried that site, payscale.com, and it was sort of lame. The spread of salary for my "type" of job was over 30K. My organization, which is not uncommon, has 6 levels of various engineers and has reasonable salary ranges for each one, maybe like 20K or so spread. This site seems like it could screw you as well as help you, i.e. tell you your high-end salary is X when your currently make X+20k. The bottom line, you know what your worth and you should always go into a new position higher than you left your old position.
It turns out that most kernel code is contributed by people paid to do the work
And this is one of the problems associated with open source: Many people get paid to do work, but the work they are paid to do is not kernel development for the open source community. That is, some developers are paid to develop software for Big Company and they end up using the knowledge gained there on the companies dime to develop open source on the side. So Big Company gets pissy when their proprietary technology makes its way into open source and lawsuits have arose due to this.
Sounds great for casual edits and what not, but serious users of Photoshop usually work with huge files, like 10, 20, 50, hell 100's of megabytes. Bandwidth, lag, connection reliability, etc. will be a serious issue for anyone doing serious Photoshop work.
I was thinking about this the other day as I set up a zombie PC as a honeypot:
I wonder if the various agencies do this for would be terrorists? Here on US soil, even over in the big sandbox. I guess the more appropriate term would be sting, but the concept is the same. Setup a weapons depot, or something else the terrorists are interested in and wait for them to come get it, and bust their ass. Remember the old scam where cops sent people with outstanding warrants notices that they won a boar or something, then busted them? I think we need to get creative, and start to be a little more proactive.
The RIAA also argues that should the attorneys' fees award stand, it would deter other copyright owners from pursuing infringement claims.
No, it would deter copyright owners from bringing baseless lawsuits against innocent people.
The record labels say that Foster failed to take advantage of the plaintiffs' offers to "end this litigation without paying anything."
So, basically, the RIAA picks a fight with someone, they lose, the person says you lost, pay my fees, and the RIAA calls "foul!"?!?! I reaaaally hope the judgement sticks, forget about the RIAA for a moment and think of all the other cases that could use an overturned decision to their advantage citing "precedence" from this case. If I ever get sued, fight it, win it, I would most definitely countersue for legal fees. We already saw that legal fees will typically outweigh the payout of a lawsuit which is cause for so many companies to settle... If you bring a fight, you had better be prepared to lose and pay up, end of story.
The format war continues, and the consumer (me) pays the price. Basically, what I am reading is that one or the other will one up the other when is comes to certain features. If you want great audio, you need the Blu-Ray, if you want a great disc with lots of cool stuff, you gotta get HD-DVD. As soon as that equals out I am sure one or the other will make something else to give the edge. I wish someone would win already so we can move on. In the end, the stalemate will block consumers from jumping over and who knows, maybe they will both self-destruct with a new technology that rises from the ashes.
It is not due to lazy, it is due to cost/schedule. As other posts point out the levels of safety that software is classified to ranges from "bring the plane down" to "who gives a shit". The later software doesn't get the thorough verification, i.e. exhaustive testing with robust test cases along with structural coverage analysis and what not, that higher levels get. The engineers would love to put more love into the these lower safety level software elements, but the issue is cost and management usually prevents the work. Risk = probability of event x severity of event, and when the risk is low and the severity of the event is low, not much work is done to reduce the probability of the event (i.e. software verification), its just economics.
The entire plane entertainment system goes down (and thankfully the cascading system failure didn't spill over to the plane navigation system)!
There was/is no danger of this happening. I develop software for major airline Flight Management Systems (FMS) and the entertainment system is physically separated from the FMS as well as other "flight critical" systems. Also, Software on an aircraft needs to be developed according to the guidelines of RTCA's DO-178B, which classifies the fallout of software into "levels". The most critical, Level A, like autopilot and flight controls requires very stringent evidence of verification. The least critical, Level E, requires basically no verification or documentation whatsoever, and this is what entertainment systems are developed under.
There was a case in the early days when in-flight entertainment systems were first put on planes where a short in the video system crashed other critical computer components due to the entertainment system and flight system being on the same electrical bus. This obviously caused changes to the rules, so now everything is separated.
10. Quantum computing and quantum cryptography
The manipulation of subatomic particles at the quantum level has raised eyebrows in computer science research departments lately
I did my masters thesis on DNA computing, specifically on the application of cryptography. At the time, in 2002, there were many large scale implementations of DNA computers that were prototypes. I think this sort of thing will be (probably already is) used exclusively to hack encrypted messages intercepted by intelligence agencies.
The basic idea of the DNA computer was to represent data using DNA strands, then implement math operations like Or's, And's, masks, shifts, etc. commonly used in encryption. Once the computer is "designed" a brute force attack is done, except that every single key (OK, ~98% of the keyspace...) is run through the algorithm in a single run. At the time when I wrote my paper a prototype machine was built to crack DES in 6 months. Obviously, this is not a great achievement, but I figure by now there is a big room busy cracking AES cyphers.
Aside from the malfunctioning issue, a VOIP line hooked into a security system is not all bad. Consider this, I have my VOIP router, cable modem, and security system on a UPS so if power goes out, the system stays up and I can still make calls (obviously, if the power outage goes beyond the local level the cable would be out). Now, if a would be thief were to target my house, he/she might think "hey, this guy has a security system, I had better cut the phone line and the power. In this case my alarm would still be active, and the thief may think he/she has more time because he snipped the phone line, but in reality the call to e911 was placed.
but the real winners will no doubt be the lawyers
Isn't this always the case? I hate these lawsuits because the rich fat-cat lawyers make out and the real people that deserve something get like $10. No sh*t M$ is settling. They have to pay millions of dollars for thousands of dollars in product just because the lawyers litigated the case at 500 per hour. It just sucks, all the people involved as plaintiffs that essentially allow those blood suckers to make millions should get some sort of profit sharing, not just their $10 cut. And don't bitch about the actual cost of doing the litigation, because that is BS and you know it!
It's funny, the whole DRM thing really seemed to come on strong after Napster was busted. In an effort to thwart the hackers and file sharing people this DRM thing kicked into high gear, yet these groups of people are probably the most savvy and creative buggers out there. The only people this DRM crap will ultimately hurt is the record/movie companies because the average Joe will just get frustrated when his new $40 HD-DVD doesn't play and gives an error of "unauthorized copy" or some crap and go off and not buy stuff any more. The hackers, I am sure, welcome the challenge and probably truly enjoy this cat and mouse game.
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I just checked plans on Verizon, and they have a 4000 minute plan, with free nights/weekends for $149.99. That is basically unlimited, since your core minutes would only be used M-F, 6am - 9pm, which is roughly 4500 minutes. Considering "In" calling and the unlikelihood that your phone would be constantly "talking" 6am-9pm I would say one might even get away with 2000 minutes at $99.00. So in other words, wheres the news. Let me know when they claim unlimited plans for like $75.00/month.
And can someone explain the 6000 minute plan, maybe it is for people that can't do math??
Wouldn't it be cheaper if M$ just paid off any of the squatters? I mean the practice of registering domain names of trademarked names sounds like good ol' capitalism to me... If M$ thinks this is unethical or whatever, ha! Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black.
Seems like a great front for a Man in The Middle attack, except that rather then setting up tons of fake ARP packets you get people to come to your site. Brilliant! Why not just use the coffee shop in the town next to you, and reprogram your MAC address to.
Well, I am not one for arguing for big business, but it's their network. They don't want to impose hard limits but reserve the right to maintain quality of service. We have all been pissed off sitting there trying to check a quick email only to get the "thinking" status from the browser followed by a timeout error. So, as TFA says:
You look at it and see there's some two to three people in the neighborhood or a college dorm . . . and what they're doing is impairing the customer experience for the rest of the people off that node," Davis said. "Then it's a business decision: Do you alienate a small percentage of customers to make your other customers happy?"
If you have 25 customers pissed off because their $50/month broadband service is constantly slow, and 1 or 2 other people are constantly downloaded 300GB worth of data per month, what would you do? The problem, I am sure is that the situation was not handled with tact and reason. It was probably handled by some schmo customer rep who was like, "naaa, you just download too much, we just can't have that." If a nice polite person got on the phone and explained it just as the guy in the article, then people might be a little more understanding, and if not, tell them to go buy their own T3 line.
OK, this isn't really GPS. It is more like RNAV that is used by planes. I.e. A VHF navaid broadcasts a signal and a receiver measures the signal and uses the Navaids known position to calculate the vector to the receiver thus providing a position estimate. Not saying this isn't cool, but why is GPS even mentioned? The beacon on the ocean floor could simply be surveyed, much like GPS datums, and it's position would just be known. Then build a navigation database, much like the airplanes use, that subs could use.
If digital cameras did some sort of "unbreakable" digital signature via steganography or checksum or something when pictures were snapped. In this day and age I think that would be great. You snap a picture, and bam the pixels are embedded with something such that an alterations to the picture could be detected.
There is a fine line between expressing one's opinion and slander. IANAL, but if I would bet some of the free speech will cross into the "communication of a statement that makes a false claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may harm the reputation of an individual, business, product, group, government or nation." (wikipedia).
Won't it be ironic if lawyers discussing lawsuits start slandering each other on a lawyer based blog and end up suing each other.
I deployed this strategy and it worked quite well. I was developing requirements for a UI on a flight system for the function of flight planning. I traveled a lot with our company plane and road "shotgun" a lot. I started bringing my notepad and jotting down what the pilot was doing with respect to flight planning. I also made several notes on the most common buttons and scenarios based upon what Air Traffic Control was telling the pilot. I flew in good weather, bad weather, heavy traffic, and light traffic. After about one or two months I went back to our spec and said, this is all wrong. The widgets here and here are "cool" from a programmers perspective but the pilots will be annoyed by this. I also made several suggestions to the radio team because one of the most common tasks the pilot did was change communication frequencies for radio navaids and ATC operators. I got a lot of flac for my suggestions, to the tune of mind your own UI, this is what the customer was shown and this is what they are going to get.
Anyway, my point is, it can work, and probably for more applications than you would initially think. It might just take a little, I hate to say it, "out of the box" thinking.
Your problem is not unique. I attend an Extreme Programming workshop near where I live and a guy by the name of Richard Sheridan came to do a presentation on his companies technique called High Tech Anthropology. It was a great presentation and it is something you might try. Basically, you camp out in the users "Den" and observe them, taking notes and trying to understand how they work, what buttons they push, which user interfaces frustrate them, which things they like, etc. You then take this back and use it to publish your requirements specs. Some XP enthusiasts talk about bringing the customer in and having them work with them team, but Richard Sheridan makes a great point, that this can sometime lead to the users becoming more like engineers rather than the other way around (like the book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum).
NASA is tracking an asteroid, that could hit the earth in 2036. OF course by "could" NASA means 1:45,000. Still, why is the US the only country tasked with worrying about this. Hopefully the members of the UN wake up and smell the asteroid!
I tried that site, payscale.com, and it was sort of lame. The spread of salary for my "type" of job was over 30K. My organization, which is not uncommon, has 6 levels of various engineers and has reasonable salary ranges for each one, maybe like 20K or so spread. This site seems like it could screw you as well as help you, i.e. tell you your high-end salary is X when your currently make X+20k. The bottom line, you know what your worth and you should always go into a new position higher than you left your old position.
And this is one of the problems associated with open source: Many people get paid to do work, but the work they are paid to do is not kernel development for the open source community. That is, some developers are paid to develop software for Big Company and they end up using the knowledge gained there on the companies dime to develop open source on the side. So Big Company gets pissy when their proprietary technology makes its way into open source and lawsuits have arose due to this.
Sounds great for casual edits and what not, but serious users of Photoshop usually work with huge files, like 10, 20, 50, hell 100's of megabytes. Bandwidth, lag, connection reliability, etc. will be a serious issue for anyone doing serious Photoshop work.
I was thinking about this the other day as I set up a zombie PC as a honeypot:
I wonder if the various agencies do this for would be terrorists? Here on US soil, even over in the big sandbox. I guess the more appropriate term would be sting, but the concept is the same. Setup a weapons depot, or something else the terrorists are interested in and wait for them to come get it, and bust their ass. Remember the old scam where cops sent people with outstanding warrants notices that they won a boar or something, then busted them? I think we need to get creative, and start to be a little more proactive.
They fixed the navigation issue, but I bet the rover still hates Mars.
No, it would deter copyright owners from bringing baseless lawsuits against innocent people.
So, basically, the RIAA picks a fight with someone, they lose, the person says you lost, pay my fees, and the RIAA calls "foul!"?!?! I reaaaally hope the judgement sticks, forget about the RIAA for a moment and think of all the other cases that could use an overturned decision to their advantage citing "precedence" from this case. If I ever get sued, fight it, win it, I would most definitely countersue for legal fees. We already saw that legal fees will typically outweigh the payout of a lawsuit which is cause for so many companies to settle... If you bring a fight, you had better be prepared to lose and pay up, end of story.
the witch is dead, the wicked witch is dead...
The format war continues, and the consumer (me) pays the price. Basically, what I am reading is that one or the other will one up the other when is comes to certain features. If you want great audio, you need the Blu-Ray, if you want a great disc with lots of cool stuff, you gotta get HD-DVD. As soon as that equals out I am sure one or the other will make something else to give the edge. I wish someone would win already so we can move on. In the end, the stalemate will block consumers from jumping over and who knows, maybe they will both self-destruct with a new technology that rises from the ashes.
It is not due to lazy, it is due to cost/schedule. As other posts point out the levels of safety that software is classified to ranges from "bring the plane down" to "who gives a shit". The later software doesn't get the thorough verification, i.e. exhaustive testing with robust test cases along with structural coverage analysis and what not, that higher levels get. The engineers would love to put more love into the these lower safety level software elements, but the issue is cost and management usually prevents the work. Risk = probability of event x severity of event, and when the risk is low and the severity of the event is low, not much work is done to reduce the probability of the event (i.e. software verification), its just economics.
There was/is no danger of this happening. I develop software for major airline Flight Management Systems (FMS) and the entertainment system is physically separated from the FMS as well as other "flight critical" systems. Also, Software on an aircraft needs to be developed according to the guidelines of RTCA's DO-178B, which classifies the fallout of software into "levels". The most critical, Level A, like autopilot and flight controls requires very stringent evidence of verification. The least critical, Level E, requires basically no verification or documentation whatsoever, and this is what entertainment systems are developed under.
There was a case in the early days when in-flight entertainment systems were first put on planes where a short in the video system crashed other critical computer components due to the entertainment system and flight system being on the same electrical bus. This obviously caused changes to the rules, so now everything is separated.
I did my masters thesis on DNA computing, specifically on the application of cryptography. At the time, in 2002, there were many large scale implementations of DNA computers that were prototypes. I think this sort of thing will be (probably already is) used exclusively to hack encrypted messages intercepted by intelligence agencies.
The basic idea of the DNA computer was to represent data using DNA strands, then implement math operations like Or's, And's, masks, shifts, etc. commonly used in encryption. Once the computer is "designed" a brute force attack is done, except that every single key (OK, ~98% of the keyspace...) is run through the algorithm in a single run. At the time when I wrote my paper a prototype machine was built to crack DES in 6 months. Obviously, this is not a great achievement, but I figure by now there is a big room busy cracking AES cyphers.
Aside from the malfunctioning issue, a VOIP line hooked into a security system is not all bad. Consider this, I have my VOIP router, cable modem, and security system on a UPS so if power goes out, the system stays up and I can still make calls (obviously, if the power outage goes beyond the local level the cable would be out). Now, if a would be thief were to target my house, he/she might think "hey, this guy has a security system, I had better cut the phone line and the power. In this case my alarm would still be active, and the thief may think he/she has more time because he snipped the phone line, but in reality the call to e911 was placed.
Isn't this always the case? I hate these lawsuits because the rich fat-cat lawyers make out and the real people that deserve something get like $10. No sh*t M$ is settling. They have to pay millions of dollars for thousands of dollars in product just because the lawyers litigated the case at 500 per hour. It just sucks, all the people involved as plaintiffs that essentially allow those blood suckers to make millions should get some sort of profit sharing, not just their $10 cut. And don't bitch about the actual cost of doing the litigation, because that is BS and you know it!
It's funny, the whole DRM thing really seemed to come on strong after Napster was busted. In an effort to thwart the hackers and file sharing people this DRM thing kicked into high gear, yet these groups of people are probably the most savvy and creative buggers out there. The only people this DRM crap will ultimately hurt is the record/movie companies because the average Joe will just get frustrated when his new $40 HD-DVD doesn't play and gives an error of "unauthorized copy" or some crap and go off and not buy stuff any more. The hackers, I am sure, welcome the challenge and probably truly enjoy this cat and mouse game.