I read MT in the German report as Metric tons, not mega-ton. what's a few orders of magnatude difference among friends. Makes perspective change dramaticaly doesn't it. 307K% difference between US output & the lake.
--- going to look up the oxygen candles they use on the space station now.....
Unless there is a distinct and pronounced rise in the mean temperature that can be shown to begin with the industrial revolution, I don't see this to be anything significant.
From the data in TFA, it only shows that there is currently a spike in the median temperature, and that there have been previous spikes and lulls.
In geological terms, IIRC we are between ice ages - 10K years into a 20K cycle. Guess what, I expect it to be warm right now & then start cooling off in the next 1K years or so.
I see lots of proof of global climate change, but I have seen very little data showing it starts with the industrial revolution and the increased production of greenhouse gasses by humans.
Compare 100 million cubic metres of gas of CO2 from 1 lake(184K Metric Tons) with 5652 Metric tons for the US in 2000. 30X the CO2 output of the US in it's worst recorded year - almost 8 times the entire worlds output. You think those numbers are bad? 1,800 tons per day of SO2 from a Hawaii volcano - with even more CO2.
Am I anti-polution control, heck no. I like breathing. But when it comes to claiming that humans are having a huge influence, I just think people are underestimating Mother Nature.
If I read some of the posts and the junk surounding this issue. The big problem is that RIM holds the mail and pushes it as soon as you log back into the network. If that's the case, just change it and have the BB specifically request the mail.
Current:
BB: Hello I'm back.
RIM: That's nice, here's your mail.
Non infringing:
BB: Hello I'm back, can I have my mail.
RIM: That's nice, here's your mail.
From what I saw of the workaround blurb, RIM is just going to store it offsite and then request it back so they can push it just like they do now.
By the way, IMO, if either of these things circumvent the patent then it's less useful than an equivalent weight of toilet paper.
If a company patents something and hides it in a drawer until a handfull of fortune 500 companies are using it, then whips it out for a lawsuit, the patent should be invalidated.
I don't think it should be invalidated, but I think that failing to enforce it for a specific application should create a tacit liscence for that application. That way if someone comes along with an improved version, you can still enforce you valid patent on that usage.
IE:
1) create novel method for no loss compressing the wikipedia to a single byte.
2) patent method
3) not enforce patent when wikipedia uses it to save server space.
4) attempt to enforce it 4 years later
5) get thrown out of court - fialure to enforce implies tacit permision.
6) enforce patent when ACME press uses same technology to put wikipedia in a digital book.
7) make money.
IANAL but AFIK there is nothing in the liscencing process that says you have to strike the same deal with everyone for the same liscence. If there is, you can always create seperate liscences for grandfathered/new businesses - probably stipulating that the grandfathered liscence is not transferable in the case of buy-out.
Also there is substantial precident for this - trademarks are the first thing to come to mind. I believe copyright is another.
Also if you voluntarily give your car keys to someone, you can't have them arrested for stealing your car - giving the keys is giving tacit permision to drive the vehicle.
Perhaps more on point, if you let people in a bar before 4PM without a covercharge, you can't decide at 9PM in the middle of a concert to demand the covercharge from people who have stayed. Allowing you to stay after 4 without charging you is implicit permision to stay without a covercharge. It's fine if you stated you would do it at the start and you didn't get around to it until 9, but you can't change the rules in the middle of the game. It's called bait & switch - or simply fraud - when it's physical objects or services. If businesses are citizens, why shouldn't IP should be treated as objects(or is permission to use IP a service?)
Problem is AT&T is what in the top 5 largest companies in the US? I'm sure they can hire a staff of ambulance chasers just to handle this one issue. If they are on staff, then no 30% legal settlement for them - just a bonus for each company they get to fork over cash.
Also, I do not believe there is an enforcement provision in the Patent system - although yes there is on trademarks - if you let people use them, you are seen as having allowed them to fall into public domain.
IINAL but I think that what should be patentable is:
* Physical objects or individual components: a new type of car transmision or even just the shift mechanism.
* Specific processes: you make asprin by doing steps 1-58 in this exact order - protects drug patents etc.
What should NOT be patentable:
* An idea: ie: Moron trying to patent a storyline.
* A general process: making asprin - in any way shape or form.
* Anything built with prebuilt components: No patenting that nifty LEGO robot. No patenting web page design. No patenting software.
As for this whole wait-until-it's-a-standard-then-sue ploy, I say if you don't enforce your patent within 2 years of being aware of someone starting to use it, then you have tacitly liscenced it to them. In this case, AT&T has known from the beginning that MPEG4 infringes on their patent - they did nothing. They have therefore tacitly liscenced their patent to the MPEG consortium for this use. New uses may of course require a new liscence, but you shouldn't be able to go back and retroactively enforce patents like this.
I think 21 might be low, there are several out there that run multiple instances under different names so they can restart them when someone shuts one down. I know my son had 1 with 4 seperate instances running & if you shut one down it would restart in under 5 seconds.
Nice how something that starts under your std user can infect the admin account too.
There has yet to be a single major case of someone who wasn't really evil being anything other than mildly inconvienced. If and when some average joe is taken advantage of, or criminally or financially damaged, THEN you will see people upset.
Blink...Blink
1) How would you know?
The vast majority of the warrents issued in the name of national security are done through the FISA court and I don't believe that they are reported in those numbers.
2)As someone else pointed out - the FBI was doing a lot of wiretapping in the 60's that had more to do with politics than crime. To think that given free reign, today would be any different is naive.
3)Since when is 'taken advantage of, or criminally or financially damaged' the standard for when it's time to stop the government. Whatever happened to the standard of "that which governs best, governs least"?
4)'There has yet to be a single major case...'
I assume you meant 'single case proven', since there are a heck of a lot of people sitting in jail on material witness warrents who have never seen a judge.
{Tangent warning based on the proven assumption}
After 100+{Reference} people have been released from death row based on DNA/other forensic evidence, people are still shouting that [shout][blink]NOBODY[/blink][/shout] has ever been executed who was proved innocent.
Of course not, why bother trying to prove someone who's already dead was innocent when you can be trying to prove someone who is still alive is innocent.
Do the vast majority of people who are on death row deserve to be there? - without a question. Are some there in error - play the odds - 3,383 people currently pending execution, all put there by groups of 12 people usually shown very ugly pictures & told by a person in authority that they {the defendant} did it.
3,383 people pending execution, 1011 executed since '76. {Reference}
122/4394=3.7% of the population of the total death row population has been cleared.
3.7%*1011=37 --- Playing the odds, the US has executed 37 people innocent of the crime they were accused of.
Are the numbers accurate? In gross terms,yes. Do they tell the whole story, no because the 1011 already executed had gone through appeal after appeal. However, given the gross numbers, statisticly at least one of those was innocent.
If I'm on death row, I would hate to have to be the 'proof'.
Would be nice to know the numbers for the FISA/no warrent taps and the outcomes of those, but that's still live NSA paperwork and not available.
I know John Glenn used to have dialup in his DC residence ---- had to tech it a few times.
Nice guy who knows how to listen, respond, & is willing to follow directions when he doesn't know the solution.
>>"We have some preliminary but very exciting results [but] we would like to formally show this
>> before making any claims that would cause unwanted hype."
>Uh...... yeah. That is why I am reading about it in the Salt Lake Tribune before hearing about
>it in Science or Nature?
Wife: So honey, what did you do at work today?
Husband: Oh, I finished up a report on a new cure for AIDS we sent it out for peer review - if we didn't miss something obvious, it'll be in Junes edition of Virology today. ...
Wife at bingo: Yes, Bob says they made a cure for AIDS.
Reporter at Bob's office next day: So is it true you have discovered a cure for AIDS? ....
June Issue of Virology Today: Utah scientist AIDS breakthrough verified.
The reason you see things in the paper is that they DON'T do peer review. They take information they are told and if it's not too tin-hatish, they print it.
Journals tend to run 3-6 months behind because they CHECK this information.
If you want to see an example of how poor management performance can negatively affect the output of a company, you only need look at the windows OS development unit.
3 letters RCN.
How not to run a company:
1) Buy up all the best Dialup ISP's with good tech support/customer service.
2) Decide since techs are just phone monkeys, anyone can do it.
3) Declare that underpaid,overworked techs desire to help people will offset the fact that performance bonuses are paid for keeping call time to a minimum.
4) Tell you're techs that customer satisfaction indexes are higher for companies who's customers have a few small easily fixed problems than those companies that just work.
5) Delay maintenance on all equipment.
6) Decide since Dialup is not part of your core business plan, it's unimportant and should be scrapped - even if it's the only division in the company turning a profit.
7) Look stunned that you're bankrupt.
** Yes I had a manager tell me 3, and a VP tell us 4. 2 I can only infer from the 'Universal Agent' philosophy and the people they brought in.
Is it any wonder that the VP of Internet technology opted for his golden parachute after 9 months.
Note the pretty letters 'GPS' inside your manual - the cell network can just ask for where you are & your phone will tell it to within 15'. In the US it's now manditory - you cannot activate an old non GPS phone anymore.
Am I the only one who sees this reverting back to the time/transfer limits that even most dialups dropped years ago here in the US?
There are already tiers in place - you want more bandwith, you pay more - RCN used to charge $20 for 3Mb instead of 1.5Mb transfer rate. And I have 768 ADLS, but I could spend more & get 1,1.5,or 2 Mb. That's not what concerns me. What bother's me is that I do a lot of work over the net from home & a good portion of it involves good sized files. Reduced image quality/size is not really an option, nor is transfering only parts of the files. For 6 years now, I have been paying for the bandwith - not the transfer volume - if I have to go back to worrying about how much volume I have transfered, I am going to another service where I don't have to worry about it.
Also, if I have a monthly allotment, will the provider be counting all of the virus traffic coming to my router against me? I have a couple of MB/month of logs hitting my firewall of nothing but virus attacks against web servers. - That's not counting port scans and other crap.
Or can we then treat spam like faxed advertisements? IIRC, you can sue for something like $100/page if someone faxes you advertisements. That would be good. I have about $2bn sitting in my yahoo acct.
The money they spent to build those fiber highways did not come from public coffers (unless I don't know about some kind of subsidy program).
Eminent Domain - a good chunk of the land they laid the lines on has been siezed either previously (RR tracks & highways) or for the actual fiber laying process.
Also a huge chunk of the R&D and some of the equipment is from DARPA projects.
These are some of the reasons that the Telco's in the US are subject to different government regulations than other types of businesses.
It bears mentioning in mind that virtually all of our nation's supply of insulin is generated by human-animal hybrids.
I thought it was produced from GM bacteria.
My favorite was that a conservative author looked at the institution of marriage to 'prove' that letting same sex couples marry would cause it to collapse.
Her conclusion is that it has been a slow state of collapse since the civil war when people went from marrying for money, social possition, and mutual protection to marrying for love.
So let's all hear it for the institution of marriage that has never changed!!!!!
A platform-independent solution: a panic button that activates a relay connected to an igniter, which ignites the blocks of thermite attached to your hard disks.
looks over both shoulders, pulls out the chemistry book, the history book, and the electrical engineering book from the deep dark hole they hide in
Need:
model rocket igniter
12V relay
soundcard
aluminum can
rusty car part
misc wiring & solder
A soundcard is a D->A converter - attatch wires to headphone jack & relay
Hook relay to igniter & powersupply
Install in PC as 2nd soundcard
Mix powdered rust with powdered aluminum - preferably in a flamable matrix.
Insert igniter into matrix & attach to hard drive.
Activate 2nd soundcard => tone to headphone jack => relay activated => current to igniter => thermite
(Fe2O3(s) + 2 Al(s) -> Al2O3(s) + 2 Fe(l)) reaction eats HD & PC & possibly house.
Unrelated historical side note - thermite reactions were used to weld the tracks together for railroads.
If anybody here works in the Waltham PD, we want our cluster computer back that you confiscated after last year's bomb threat. Thanks.
Good luck - took me 5 months to get my cookie tray back after I dropped off the surplus of a cookie exchange.
The laws are so broad now that you could randomly download a ton of pornograhic images and then delete them. But if somebody finds them in your recycle bin and a few include minors of any sort you could go to jail for a long time.
I believe that someone in fact created & distributed a message reguarding this to a bunch of newsgroups a few years ago. - Something along the lines of posting an image of a kitten or something in a recipee newsgroup along with the notification that if it had been child pornography they would now be eligable for 10-20 years in jail. It was someones attempt to attract attention to some stupid law congress was passing at the time.
I don't agree with any company having to give out its secrets. I mean, what if Europe demanded to know the secret ingredients to certain food products. That may be a bad comparison, but Microsoft or any other company shouldn't have to give out its top secret source code.
They were not asked to divulge thier code, they were told to provide accurate and thorough documentation on the multiple API's in the Window's OS that are used and documented internally but not provided to competitors.
Rather than provide the documentation requested - which would make anyone capable of understanding an API and writing code to interact with it, they opted to instead offer to provide the source-code - liscenced for a reasonable fee, and with heavy restrictions - as an equivalent solution.
Two things I really have a problem with:
1) Free Documentation on APIs != expencive liscence on code I have to spend weeks trying to understand
2) what the heck is a [reasonable fee] to a company with an operating buget of more than the GNP of half the countries on the planet?
Rough history -
1) congress passed legislation saying if it's 'harmful' for kids to see it then the site owner has a legal duty to restrict access in some arbitrary and perfectly pointless way.
2) AG tried to enforce stupid law.
3) SC said some of the law is OK but other parts of it violate free speach - IE asking for a CC# to view a website restricts your ability to speak to the poor and underprivalidged(sp?).
4) AG says it's not so and even if it is so, it's our patriotic duty [wave flag here] to protect children from seeing or reading about sex. (Violence is ok, but Sex is bad - remember this, it's a core tennent to most conservative conversations)
5) AG says to SC, look we'll prove that there's so much smut on the internet that we HAVE to take THIS action and therefore you'll have to reconcider and let us do what we want.
6) AG says to search engines give us 1m random searches and websites so we can prove there is too much smut on the internet.
7) Yahoo,MS etc say OK.
8) Google says WTF?
9) AG takes them to court and tells the judge make them play our game in our sandbox.
10) judge says.....?
My problem with the whole thing is that even if there is so much smut that something should be done (we of course know that parental guidance and monitoring is positively the wrong way to go here), if the SC already said you can't do it the way the law is written, showing there's smut on the internet [say it isn't so] doesn't change the fact that the law restricts freedom of speech and can't be enforced.
IANAL - and this is so vague it's probably worthless, but it's a general summary of what I have been able to piece together.
Providing something *FOR FREE* that is available *FOR FREE* would seem to have a "nil financial effect on the copyright holders", no?
Um actually I can certainly see a financial gain for the origional CW holder.... bandwidth can be very expencive --- if you/. my server and/or I run out of my BW for the week/month, a cached copy keeps my page - complete with my adds - available until I have more BW available.
No, for me the "Real" question is "Why?", as in "Why was Apple so asinine and inane as to not just make the new Intel-based iron capable of booting Windows and Linux disros as is?" To save a couple of bucks? To restrict the practice (even after they said they wouldn't)? To be consistent (Apple's track record for doing stupid, head-scratching things)?
Actually it goes very well with Apples hardware philosophy...
1)NUBUS - at the time, it was a faster, more advanced bus type than PCI - they went with it.
2)PPC - faster, very bleeding edge and theoretically much more scaleable than the x86 chips.
3)SCSI - very anoying, but capable of implimenting everything USB2 does now only 20 years ago.
Apple's issue generally isn't bad hardware decisions, it's that they get ahead of the curve with sound tech and then other mfg don't/won't follow because they are Apple.
In fact, testing for lynx, et al., is also probably a waste of time.
Hmm... et al is probably true, but if it works for lynx then it works for most of the apps for the visually impared -- which depending on your site and/or potential contracts then it might be worth it.
I believe that under the ADA there are parts of the government that are essentially required to produce lynx compliant external facing sites.
Slashdot Mirror
I read MT in the German report as Metric tons, not mega-ton. what's a few orders of magnatude difference among friends. Makes perspective change dramaticaly doesn't it. 307K% difference between US output & the lake.
--- going to look up the oxygen candles they use on the space station now.....
Unless there is a distinct and pronounced rise in the mean temperature that can be shown to begin with the industrial revolution, I don't see this to be anything significant.
From the data in TFA, it only shows that there is currently a spike in the median temperature, and that there have been previous spikes and lulls.
In geological terms, IIRC we are between ice ages - 10K years into a 20K cycle. Guess what, I expect it to be warm right now & then start cooling off in the next 1K years or so.
I see lots of proof of global climate change, but I have seen very little data showing it starts with the industrial revolution and the increased production of greenhouse gasses by humans.
Compare 100 million cubic metres of gas of CO2 from 1 lake (184K Metric Tons) with 5652 Metric tons for the US in 2000. 30X the CO2 output of the US in it's worst recorded year - almost 8 times the entire worlds output. You think those numbers are bad? 1,800 tons per day of SO2 from a Hawaii volcano - with even more CO2.
Am I anti-polution control, heck no. I like breathing. But when it comes to claiming that humans are having a huge influence, I just think people are underestimating Mother Nature.
If I read some of the posts and the junk surounding this issue. The big problem is that RIM holds the mail and pushes it as soon as you log back into the network.
If that's the case, just change it and have the BB specifically request the mail.
Current: BB: Hello I'm back. RIM: That's nice, here's your mail. Non infringing: BB: Hello I'm back, can I have my mail. RIM: That's nice, here's your mail. From what I saw of the workaround blurb, RIM is just going to store it offsite and then request it back so they can push it just like they do now.
By the way, IMO, if either of these things circumvent the patent then it's less useful than an equivalent weight of toilet paper.
If a company patents something and hides it in a drawer until a handfull of fortune 500 companies are using it, then whips it out for a lawsuit, the patent should be invalidated.
I don't think it should be invalidated, but I think that failing to enforce it for a specific application should create a tacit liscence for that application. That way if someone comes along with an improved version, you can still enforce you valid patent on that usage.
IE:
1) create novel method for no loss compressing the wikipedia to a single byte. 2) patent method 3) not enforce patent when wikipedia uses it to save server space. 4) attempt to enforce it 4 years later 5) get thrown out of court - fialure to enforce implies tacit permision. 6) enforce patent when ACME press uses same technology to put wikipedia in a digital book. 7) make money. IANAL but AFIK there is nothing in the liscencing process that says you have to strike the same deal with everyone for the same liscence. If there is, you can always create seperate liscences for grandfathered/new businesses - probably stipulating that the grandfathered liscence is not transferable in the case of buy-out.
Also there is substantial precident for this - trademarks are the first thing to come to mind. I believe copyright is another.
Also if you voluntarily give your car keys to someone, you can't have them arrested for stealing your car - giving the keys is giving tacit permision to drive the vehicle.
Perhaps more on point, if you let people in a bar before 4PM without a covercharge, you can't decide at 9PM in the middle of a concert to demand the covercharge from people who have stayed. Allowing you to stay after 4 without charging you is implicit permision to stay without a covercharge. It's fine if you stated you would do it at the start and you didn't get around to it until 9, but you can't change the rules in the middle of the game. It's called bait & switch - or simply fraud - when it's physical objects or services. If businesses are citizens, why shouldn't IP should be treated as objects(or is permission to use IP a service?)
Mail2Web.
Last time I checked, it posted it's IP address on the header not the IP address of the PC you logged in from.
Problem is AT&T is what in the top 5 largest companies in the US? I'm sure they can hire a staff of ambulance chasers just to handle this one issue. If they are on staff, then no 30% legal settlement for them - just a bonus for each company they get to fork over cash.
Also, I do not believe there is an enforcement provision in the Patent system - although yes there is on trademarks - if you let people use them, you are seen as having allowed them to fall into public domain.
IINAL but I think that what should be patentable is:
* Physical objects or individual components: a new type of car transmision or even just the shift mechanism. * Specific processes: you make asprin by doing steps 1-58 in this exact order - protects drug patents etc. What should NOT be patentable:
* An idea: ie: Moron trying to patent a storyline. * A general process: making asprin - in any way shape or form. * Anything built with prebuilt components: No patenting that nifty LEGO robot. No patenting web page design. No patenting software.
As for this whole wait-until-it's-a-standard-then-sue ploy, I say if you don't enforce your patent within 2 years of being aware of someone starting to use it, then you have tacitly liscenced it to them. In this case, AT&T has known from the beginning that MPEG4 infringes on their patent - they did nothing. They have therefore tacitly liscenced their patent to the MPEG consortium for this use. New uses may of course require a new liscence, but you shouldn't be able to go back and retroactively enforce patents like this.
I think 21 might be low, there are several out there that run multiple instances under different names so they can restart them when someone shuts one down. I know my son had 1 with 4 seperate instances running & if you shut one down it would restart in under 5 seconds.
Nice how something that starts under your std user can infect the admin account too.
There has yet to be a single major case of someone who wasn't really evil being anything other than mildly inconvienced. If and when some average joe is taken advantage of, or criminally or financially damaged, THEN you will see people upset.
...'
Blink...Blink
1) How would you know?
The vast majority of the warrents issued in the name of national security are done through the FISA court and I don't believe that they are reported in those numbers.
2)As someone else pointed out - the FBI was doing a lot of wiretapping in the 60's that had more to do with politics than crime. To think that given free reign, today would be any different is naive.
3)Since when is 'taken advantage of, or criminally or financially damaged' the standard for when it's time to stop the government. Whatever happened to the standard of "that which governs best, governs least"?
4)'There has yet to be a single major case
I assume you meant 'single case proven', since there are a heck of a lot of people sitting in jail on material witness warrents who have never seen a judge.
{Tangent warning based on the proven assumption}
After 100+{Reference} people have been released from death row based on DNA/other forensic evidence, people are still shouting that [shout][blink]NOBODY[/blink][/shout] has ever been executed who was proved innocent.
Of course not, why bother trying to prove someone who's already dead was innocent when you can be trying to prove someone who is still alive is innocent.
Do the vast majority of people who are on death row deserve to be there? - without a question. Are some there in error - play the odds - 3,383 people currently pending execution, all put there by groups of 12 people usually shown very ugly pictures & told by a person in authority that they {the defendant} did it.
3,383 people pending execution, 1011 executed since '76. {Reference}
122/4394=3.7% of the population of the total death row population has been cleared.
3.7%*1011=37 --- Playing the odds, the US has executed 37 people innocent of the crime they were accused of.
Are the numbers accurate? In gross terms,yes. Do they tell the whole story, no because the 1011 already executed had gone through appeal after appeal. However, given the gross numbers, statisticly at least one of those was innocent.
If I'm on death row, I would hate to have to be the 'proof'.
Would be nice to know the numbers for the FISA/no warrent taps and the outcomes of those, but that's still live NSA paperwork and not available.
I know John Glenn used to have dialup in his DC residence ---- had to tech it a few times.
Nice guy who knows how to listen, respond, & is willing to follow directions when he doesn't know the solution.
You forgot kinesthetic sense - 'feeling' the relative position of your joints. Very important as anyone with leg nerve damage knows.
>>"We have some preliminary but very exciting results [but] we would like to formally show this
...
....
>> before making any claims that would cause unwanted hype."
>Uh...... yeah. That is why I am reading about it in the Salt Lake Tribune before hearing about
>it in Science or Nature?
Wife: So honey, what did you do at work today?
Husband: Oh, I finished up a report on a new cure for AIDS we sent it out for peer review - if we didn't miss something obvious, it'll be in Junes edition of Virology today.
Wife at bingo: Yes, Bob says they made a cure for AIDS.
Reporter at Bob's office next day: So is it true you have discovered a cure for AIDS?
June Issue of Virology Today: Utah scientist AIDS breakthrough verified.
The reason you see things in the paper is that they DON'T do peer review. They take information they are told and if it's not too tin-hatish, they print it.
Journals tend to run 3-6 months behind because they CHECK this information.
If you want to see an example of how poor management performance can negatively affect the output of a company, you only need look at the windows OS development unit.
3 letters RCN.
How not to run a company:
1) Buy up all the best Dialup ISP's with good tech support/customer service.
2) Decide since techs are just phone monkeys, anyone can do it.
3) Declare that underpaid,overworked techs desire to help people will offset the fact that performance bonuses are paid for keeping call time to a minimum.
4) Tell you're techs that customer satisfaction indexes are higher for companies who's customers have a few small easily fixed problems than those companies that just work.
5) Delay maintenance on all equipment.
6) Decide since Dialup is not part of your core business plan, it's unimportant and should be scrapped - even if it's the only division in the company turning a profit.
7) Look stunned that you're bankrupt.
** Yes I had a manager tell me 3, and a VP tell us 4. 2 I can only infer from the 'Universal Agent' philosophy and the people they brought in.
Is it any wonder that the VP of Internet technology opted for his golden parachute after 9 months.
Note the pretty letters 'GPS' inside your manual - the cell network can just ask for where you are & your phone will tell it to within 15'. In the US it's now manditory - you cannot activate an old non GPS phone anymore.
Am I the only one who sees this reverting back to the time/transfer limits that even most dialups dropped years ago here in the US?
There are already tiers in place - you want more bandwith, you pay more - RCN used to charge $20 for 3Mb instead of 1.5Mb transfer rate. And I have 768 ADLS, but I could spend more & get 1,1.5,or 2 Mb. That's not what concerns me. What bother's me is that I do a lot of work over the net from home & a good portion of it involves good sized files. Reduced image quality/size is not really an option, nor is transfering only parts of the files. For 6 years now, I have been paying for the bandwith - not the transfer volume - if I have to go back to worrying about how much volume I have transfered, I am going to another service where I don't have to worry about it.
Also, if I have a monthly allotment, will the provider be counting all of the virus traffic coming to my router against me? I have a couple of MB/month of logs hitting my firewall of nothing but virus attacks against web servers. - That's not counting port scans and other crap.
Or can we then treat spam like faxed advertisements? IIRC, you can sue for something like $100/page if someone faxes you advertisements. That would be good. I have about $2bn sitting in my yahoo acct.
The money they spent to build those fiber highways did not come from public coffers (unless I don't know about some kind of subsidy program).
Eminent Domain - a good chunk of the land they laid the lines on has been siezed either previously (RR tracks & highways) or for the actual fiber laying process.
Also a huge chunk of the R&D and some of the equipment is from DARPA projects.
These are some of the reasons that the Telco's in the US are subject to different government regulations than other types of businesses.
It bears mentioning in mind that virtually all of our nation's supply of insulin is generated by human-animal hybrids.
I thought it was produced from GM bacteria.
My favorite was that a conservative author looked at the institution of marriage to 'prove' that letting same sex couples marry would cause it to collapse.
Her conclusion is that it has been a slow state of collapse since the civil war when people went from marrying for money, social possition, and mutual protection to marrying for love.
So let's all hear it for the institution of marriage that has never changed!!!!!
looks over both shoulders, pulls out the chemistry book, the history book, and the electrical engineering book from the deep dark hole they hide in
Need:
model rocket igniter
12V relay
soundcard
aluminum can
rusty car part
misc wiring & solder
A soundcard is a D->A converter - attatch wires to headphone jack & relay
Hook relay to igniter & powersupply
Install in PC as 2nd soundcard
Mix powdered rust with powdered aluminum - preferably in a flamable matrix.
Insert igniter into matrix & attach to hard drive.
Activate 2nd soundcard => tone to headphone jack => relay activated => current to igniter => thermite (Fe2O3(s) + 2 Al(s) -> Al2O3(s) + 2 Fe(l)) reaction eats HD & PC & possibly house.
Unrelated historical side note - thermite reactions were used to weld the tracks together for railroads.
If anybody here works in the Waltham PD, we want our cluster computer back that you confiscated after last year's bomb threat. Thanks.
Good luck - took me 5 months to get my cookie tray back after I dropped off the surplus of a cookie exchange.
The laws are so broad now that you could randomly download a ton of pornograhic images and then delete them. But if somebody finds them in your recycle bin and a few include minors of any sort you could go to jail for a long time.
I believe that someone in fact created & distributed a message reguarding this to a bunch of newsgroups a few years ago. - Something along the lines of posting an image of a kitten or something in a recipee newsgroup along with the notification that if it had been child pornography they would now be eligable for 10-20 years in jail. It was someones attempt to attract attention to some stupid law congress was passing at the time.
I don't agree with any company having to give out its secrets. I mean, what if Europe demanded to know the secret ingredients to certain food products. That may be a bad comparison, but Microsoft or any other company shouldn't have to give out its top secret source code.
They were not asked to divulge thier code, they were told to provide accurate and thorough documentation on the multiple API's in the Window's OS that are used and documented internally but not provided to competitors.
Rather than provide the documentation requested - which would make anyone capable of understanding an API and writing code to interact with it, they opted to instead offer to provide the source-code - liscenced for a reasonable fee, and with heavy restrictions - as an equivalent solution.
Two things I really have a problem with:
1) Free Documentation on APIs != expencive liscence on code I have to spend weeks trying to understand
2) what the heck is a [reasonable fee] to a company with an operating buget of more than the GNP of half the countries on the planet?
Rough history - .....?
1) congress passed legislation saying if it's 'harmful' for kids to see it then the site owner has a legal duty to restrict access in some arbitrary and perfectly pointless way.
2) AG tried to enforce stupid law.
3) SC said some of the law is OK but other parts of it violate free speach - IE asking for a CC# to view a website restricts your ability to speak to the poor and underprivalidged(sp?).
4) AG says it's not so and even if it is so, it's our patriotic duty [wave flag here] to protect children from seeing or reading about sex. (Violence is ok, but Sex is bad - remember this, it's a core tennent to most conservative conversations)
5) AG says to SC, look we'll prove that there's so much smut on the internet that we HAVE to take THIS action and therefore you'll have to reconcider and let us do what we want.
6) AG says to search engines give us 1m random searches and websites so we can prove there is too much smut on the internet.
7) Yahoo,MS etc say OK.
8) Google says WTF?
9) AG takes them to court and tells the judge make them play our game in our sandbox.
10) judge says
My problem with the whole thing is that even if there is so much smut that something should be done (we of course know that parental guidance and monitoring is positively the wrong way to go here), if the SC already said you can't do it the way the law is written, showing there's smut on the internet [say it isn't so] doesn't change the fact that the law restricts freedom of speech and can't be enforced.
IANAL - and this is so vague it's probably worthless, but it's a general summary of what I have been able to piece together.
Providing something *FOR FREE* that is available *FOR FREE* would seem to have a "nil financial effect on the copyright holders", no? Um actually I can certainly see a financial gain for the origional CW holder .... bandwidth can be very expencive --- if you /. my server and/or I run out of my BW for the week/month, a cached copy keeps my page - complete with my adds - available until I have more BW available.
No, for me the "Real" question is "Why?", as in "Why was Apple so asinine and inane as to not just make the new Intel-based iron capable of booting Windows and Linux disros as is?" To save a couple of bucks? To restrict the practice (even after they said they wouldn't)? To be consistent (Apple's track record for doing stupid, head-scratching things)? ...
Actually it goes very well with Apples hardware philosophy
1)NUBUS - at the time, it was a faster, more advanced bus type than PCI - they went with it.
2)PPC - faster, very bleeding edge and theoretically much more scaleable than the x86 chips.
3)SCSI - very anoying, but capable of implimenting everything USB2 does now only 20 years ago.
Apple's issue generally isn't bad hardware decisions, it's that they get ahead of the curve with sound tech and then other mfg don't/won't follow because they are Apple.
In fact, testing for lynx, et al., is also probably a waste of time.
Hmm... et al is probably true, but if it works for lynx then it works for most of the apps for the visually impared -- which depending on your site and/or potential contracts then it might be worth it.
I believe that under the ADA there are parts of the government that are essentially required to produce lynx compliant external facing sites.