Since there wasn't any disclaimer that I saw, I don't know to exepct different behavior depending on if you paid for it, or got it free.
Eventually something will get me to buy it, and then I'll find out. Of course, my next phone I might not root either, so some of this is moot. But experience does not give me much solace.
I've been using Android since the beginning (ok, maybe a month after the beginning) and I have YET to buy an app.
I'm cheap, I pay a lot for service, and most of the paid apps I've seen are pus. A few are cool, it happens I don't need or want them.
It is not yet worth $1.99 to me to suppress ads, and I've seen one app (just one of thousands, yes) that promised no ads and just moved them to other screens.
I've also lost download history, and really don't trust the Market to remember me through every OTA upgrade, custom ROM, and system wipe. Sorry, color me cynical, but it can't remember the free stuff.
And then there's the problems of both excellent free apps and my somewhat limited needs - I dont need arcarde-quality games, most of the 'cool' apps look like they are designed to capture my 'social data' and market me, and everything high profile like Facebook etc are all free.
I don't know if I will buy an app in the next year, unless the Market finds a way to punish free devs, whicn it might.
My iPhone fanboi friends tell me they pretty much have to buy apps, cause devs have to pay to play. And the two iPhone devs at work point out that yes, it costs to develop for IOS. They and another develop for Android also, and they all used my spare G1 as a mule to demo projects. My live G1 I lent out to tether those into the mobile network. Net cost for the spare G1 to me was $35. Leftover iPhones? More.
"and a worrying precedent that judges consider social networking content to be public data."
Define 'public'. Meaning those you allow to see it is the more accurate, and operative, definition. Even if that is one.
If you post on Facebook to your ONE friend, you might make a case that it's not 'public'.
If you post on Facebook to your TWO Friends, you are on more tenuous ground.
If you have more than TWO friends on Facebook, you are no longer so 'private'.
Benjamin Frankline once posited:
"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
I've read of several cases where facebook posts were used in court, to the significant disadvantage of the poster. Some of the examples are genuinely disappointing, and the complaints about abuse and lack of privacy are shallow and not convincing.
If you have a secret, you should consider keeping it a secret. Really. Postings on any retrievable media are going to be sought for, and if they are found, you're stuck with them.
Perhaps the most significant impact of the Internet and the eas of sharing information is in the area of public records, which before the Internet were actually anything but 'public'. Now court records, tax and real estate records, and more are a few clicks away. Turns out, 'public' records are not so appreciated when it's your ox that is gored. Not that this attitude is anything new.
Forget 'nothing on the web is "private" '. Nothing you write and leave somewhere else is private. Nothing you do in the presence of another is private.
They are legitimizig the media industries' attempt to suppress a protocol's use by marginalizing it. In a small way first, but the camel's nose in under the tent flap.
Bittorrent is entirely useful for downloading ISOs of Linux distributions, encrypted data shared lawfully betweeen any number of parties, and other uses.
If this reasoning were expanded to a simple, logical conclusion, encryption would be illegal for regular people like me to use - since criminals use it to disguise their activities, it can't be permitted for use by anyone except those who can demonstrate a genuine need, and are above reproach. Not a lot of complaints from the media conglomerates about Akamai, for instance.
First they came for Napster, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't using it.
Then they came for LimeWire, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't usign that either.
Then they came for Pirate Bay, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a pirater.
Then they came for Spotify, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't in Europe.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
"spam now accounts for 78.6 percent of all email traffic"
"March 2009, when the global spam rate was 75.7 percent of all email traffic"
"January 2010, when the spam rate was 83.9% of all email traffic."
BS. If you carefully define spam, you can get close to those numbers. My server is rejecting 94% of incoming mail outright, either from banned domains and IP ranges, or obvious spams in subjects, or fictitious senders, or redirects that are 100% spam. NO complaints from any of the users that they are missing legitimate email, and my hosts.deny and reject files are getting really big. Blocking.cn,.ro, and.cz is a good start, for you beginners. I don't share my blocks beyond that, some of them get irritated when I call them spammers, even if they are.
Of what passes the initial filtering, 60% of THAT fails Spamassassin tests, and another 10-15% fails blacklists. I'm only one user, but it appears that I get around 15,000 messages a day to my address, with about 900 or so getting to Spamassassin, and I see about 20-30 a day that are not spam, with 10 or so that get through. From 1-3 false positives that are let through to me with lower scores, the same ones all the time, go figure. Jeez, actually it's worse than I thought.
I'm getting around 97% or more spam, and my email domain is unexceptional save for the fact that it's about 15 years old. So it does get a lot of spam from old, old, old lists.
If the spam experts are using younger, stronger addresses as tests, they are just avoiding the truth. If spam were only 83+%, I would be happier. But it's not. Spam is overwhelmingly the vast majority of email volume, worse than even the pessimists declare. Symantec can go pound it.
This is similar to trying to explain why telephone service is so crappy in some part of the U.S. The Northeast, for example:
1- Weather. Ice and snow cause downed lines. Electricity is most commonly out, because the lines are highest, but phone service follows. Needless to say, when the power is out, all other services fail in a certain period of time.
2- Age. Some parts of New Jersey might have the oldest telephone cable plant in America, but the Northeast in general is probably not far behind. Maine and Vermont in particular may have really old cabling because much of the rural voice cabling is just not being updated. Overlaying it with fiber doesn't fix what is, in those areas, the last 10 miles. I had personal experience with this problem in the 70s and 80s, and some of those areas still haven't seen maintenance.
It's expensive to provide the sort of service South Korea, for example, has in the U.S. South Korea is slightly larger than Indiana with a population almost 3 times that of California. I'd rather wire that, with all the density problems involved, than to wire up the Great Plains and try to break even in the process.
And then there's culture. Wiring Manhattan probably requires skillful negotiation with any number of entities. Wiring Seoul apparently required getting up on the pole and hanging fiber and CAT5 before anyone noticed. Cable systems were not designed in the 70s & 80s to provide DOCSIS, so cable Internet is something of a compromise. ISDN did so well it was ditched for DSL, which is on what generation and still is marginal for many users? In my area, DSL is competitive with cable, but I live literally 30 feet from the DSLAM and can get a hot signal and 25MB up and down if I want to pay for it. My cable service will do it too if I spring for a DOCSIS 3 modem. My friends back in Maine live maybe 3 miles outside of a city and have no option besides the extended cable provider, and they get 2-5MB on a good day, if it stays up long enough to download anything useful. And they pay more.
The problem is economics. Monopolies, geography, marketing. Even wireless is subject to the political machinations that will delay or prevent it from being an alternative.
And South Korean users do WHAT with their copious bandwidth? Games? Facebook?
Oh, pretty much what WE do with it?
Considering 2/3 of Internet users in the US probably don't use it to read their horoscopes, unless you have a citation to offer that I can't find. That would be one.
Like they didn't seem to want to try an Arduino? Pretty cheap, prety light, lots of I/O options, simple IDE, reasonable power consumption I think... There is some discussion that some Arduinos are comparable to phones in power usage.
Anyways, they are thinking of using phone chipsets, so some of the micro boards could also work. And lets also assume they won't be using phone radios, there's some savings there, but lots of other alternatives seem to be at least as good.
Besides, Arduino in space sounds a lot cooler. And it's already been done, so we can razz the Brits.
I just want to be entertained by an action flick. If I want to be moved, I'll see The King's Speech again.
There's all kinds of room for a Matrix prequel. We really don't quite know how Neo begins to question the Matrix, and of course who got out first. Or if they were just survivors from the initial enslavement. Which means another prequel to explain the rise of the machines. Oh, wait, that's another movie. No, wait, plot is pretty much the same, just change a few things and it's fine. After all, how many action plots are there? Four? Gimme another big-budget Bond movie anyways, the weapons are actually better and the villains much more believable.
If these turn out to be sequels instead, well, then they will probably explore life outside the Matrix in more detail. Grime and clever hacks sounds like another installment of Riddick, but it will be beautiful. Prequels mean more intellectualism. Sequels mean more action effects.
I'll see them. Hell, they remade Tron and nobody died out here in meatspace because of it. So far as I know.
Oh, when do we get the nedt two Star Trek movies? They need to put Vulcan back together, for starters. And Chris Pike needs his close-up.
They got the screw part right. I suddenly feel like I've been, well, actually I don't have an iPhone. But I will get screwed, eventually, by the CamCar Ring Screw or its ilk.
"Verizon argues that the FCC does not have the legal authority to mandate how Internet service providers treat content on their networks".
When you put it that way, Verizon is right. Their networks are their networks.
Now, when I get Internet service from Verizon, I expect to get the Internet, unless they say otherwise in my contract, and disclaimers like network management or not impacting other users are just weasel-speak.
But this gives me hope. It is the ONLY reason I've had in a decade to get back into the ISP business. If only it didn't take a hundred million to get started. Gone are the days of a T-1 and box of modems. Now you need a GigE uplink and peering and hugely expensive border routers just to serve your half of the city.
But, again, there's opportunity there to get in and provide unfiltered Internet. It just takes enormous capital. So we are probably gonna fail.
I'm beginning to think this is a contract law issue. Make ISPs state in advance what they will or will not provide as part of their service. Vague 'network management' disclaimers should not be allowed.
Low-power processors struggle against a lot of insults. At voltages around 3v, your circuitry is susceptable to all sorts of interference. So a lot of what you're calling 'hardening' is designed in from the beginning. Differential interfaces and such help with this, and even on-chip shielding to prevent errors. This can be helpful inpreventing interference to other devices, but cannot be relied upon by itself.
FCC certification is a two-way street, as devices cannot create a nuisance, while also being able to survive in a hostile environment. For the purposes of this discussion, FCC certification ensures that the device doesn't cause egregious interference to licensed users of potentially impacted spectra. I don't think the FCC can certify that a device will cause NO interference in all circumstances, but they have standards.
Avionics are not nearly as delicate as we are lead to believe, since a lot of electronics are being left on no matter the policy. 'Turning off' your Blackberry requires removing the battery. Putting it in 'Airplane Mode' tuens off the radios, which are the worst case threats to avionics, though I doubt they are a real threat. From a practical standpoint, a raido so poorly designed and operating that it emits spurious transmissions is inefficient, and battery life is important. Just by accident, most cell phones are not going to be interfering because it's wasteful. Add to that FCC certification that requires them to play nice in their own spectrum, and I think your cell phone is less a threat than your electric razor, which is potentially a broadband jammer in the guise of a DC motor, if it uses brushes. Brushless motors will move the transmitter from spark gap to the motor control circuit. I'm wondering now if just sparking a 9volt battery would be any problem... TSA, you listening? Gotta start banning electricity. For you bad people, I'm not going to discuss tuning this thing, ok?
Overall, most devices are a lot more threatened by interference than airliner avionics. Still, I see no reason to permit transmitters to operate during takeoff and landing. At 30,000 feet, let them try and make a call. Actually, at altitude, using your cell phone is a real pain. You go through cells ever few seconds, if you get one that actually looks up at the sky.
More importantly, though, for me, is it's prudent to not permit devices to be used, not IMHO an onerous reqiurement at all, during critical flight phases. No real problem.
And yes, I have used FM radios inflight. Big woop. But I give up my cell phone, that doesn't seem to make sense. Not that important to me. Listening to FM is just a time waster, and gives me a flavor of programming across the country.
As they find ways to process MORE applications, and approve them at breakneck speed.
Google may have to defend Android and other stuff by defeating patents. Somehow, for instance, I wonder if anyone has ever built a similar architecture to Android and if they did it before the Java patents were applied for. Prior art is their best defense.
IANAL, so I can't tell if failing to defend a patent against infringment is a defense against selective prosecution. Google may be a target for several reasons, but others may have been ignored in the past.
There is little good about software patents any more. True innovation is crushed too often, and trying to re-use anything, while it's probably fundamental to patent protection, leave you wondering if anything new can be built.
It took two cups of coffee (one half-caffeinated) to get this.
First, you're here, your a Slashdotter, even if you're an AC.
I spend time here for the same reason you do - the discussion. Even busy people do things, my friend, but wasting my time is the same whether I'm busy or not. The ad hominem attack has set the stage. Already you dislike me as much as you dislike my opinions. Nice.
Citations for damages and casualties from 'war by technical maipulation of the Internet' are plentiful, so long as we limit ourselves to physical damage. Most recently, the Stuxnet worm is credited with damage to Iran's nuclear processing facilities. I use the phrase 'war by technical maipulation of the Internet' badly, I admit, because the sensitivity to the use of 'cyber' anything is great. I wonder if there were any injuries in Iran as a result of the problems with centrifuges? I don't take any pleasure in that thought, but if it did, then you have an example of casualties.
My topic is not limited to electronic warfare, but encompasses retaliation by whatever means. Certainly you can understand that if you send someone sitting next to you an insulting text message, you risk a response. Even a verbal response could be seen as an escalation. Me? I might just get up and move away, depending on the nature of the insult. But if we knew where a camp of programmers were working to do damage to U.S. utilities, for instance, at the least we might drop a 'not so smart' bomb on their Internet connection. There are exceptions, and this might not be the response in all circumstances. If you're knowledgable in this realm, you might have some better ideas,but I make a hypothetical case that does not match reality much at all. There will be no camps of programmers. They will be dispersed. Bombs won't be much use at all.
And certainly, you're wiser than to pretend that war, in and of itself, is an affront to human rights and the rule of law. You sound as if you think boxing, for example, should somehow prevent each participant from actually hurting the other. No, that isn't boxing. And there is no such thing as a 'polite' war. Yes, there is such a thing as egregious violations of human rights in war, but you'll prefer to focus on the conduct of others, I suspect.
Alas, though, now I'm disappointed, You wrote, in part;
"Why would anyone shill for anyone else in the "western hemisphere"
I get it. You got a problem with the Western Hemisphere? I understand. Yes, I really do.
I don't see the XO as an option for regions where 'get someone a job' is the most likely and desireable outcome. Mind you, I have NO idea where all the XOs go, but it was at least intended that they go where there is no electricity, no infrastructure, not much at all. That is the power of seeding computers into places where there is so little.
So in that light I don't see 'get a job' as so important as 'get an education', or 'encourage ideas'. Yes, many of these will result in getting a job, and that's good, but it's not the only good outcome, nor is it perhaps the best one, depending on circumstances.
But if getting a job is a primary goal, then how does a Windows lock-in do better than a Linux lock-in? Both offer excellent development environments, both have large markets, substantial need for applications, etc. Windows will force an XO user to repidly confront licensing and costs to expand much beyond the intial XO experience, while Linux can be done virtually for free, though distribution is the most likely cost of acquiring new software, IDEs, etc.
And if you can program in or leverage Linux, you'll do just fine with a Windows machine and a fairly short orientation period.
The XO is not intended for 'most places', so far as I knew, but if its appeal is broadening the market, great. Sounds like we may want more than one sort of XO. This is good.
ps- The Zulu will figure out how to transition from Linux to Windows. So will many people. I figured out how to transition from Windows to Linux, which seems much more difficult, even in hindsight. Now I can straddle both worlds. This would be good for nearly every XO audience.
Slashdot Mirror
Since there wasn't any disclaimer that I saw, I don't know to exepct different behavior depending on if you paid for it, or got it free.
Eventually something will get me to buy it, and then I'll find out. Of course, my next phone I might not root either, so some of this is moot. But experience does not give me much solace.
Mod parent up.
I've been using Android since the beginning (ok, maybe a month after the beginning) and I have YET to buy an app.
I'm cheap, I pay a lot for service, and most of the paid apps I've seen are pus. A few are cool, it happens I don't need or want them.
It is not yet worth $1.99 to me to suppress ads, and I've seen one app (just one of thousands, yes) that promised no ads and just moved them to other screens.
I've also lost download history, and really don't trust the Market to remember me through every OTA upgrade, custom ROM, and system wipe. Sorry, color me cynical, but it can't remember the free stuff.
And then there's the problems of both excellent free apps and my somewhat limited needs - I dont need arcarde-quality games, most of the 'cool' apps look like they are designed to capture my 'social data' and market me, and everything high profile like Facebook etc are all free.
I don't know if I will buy an app in the next year, unless the Market finds a way to punish free devs, whicn it might.
My iPhone fanboi friends tell me they pretty much have to buy apps, cause devs have to pay to play. And the two iPhone devs at work point out that yes, it costs to develop for IOS. They and another develop for Android also, and they all used my spare G1 as a mule to demo projects. My live G1 I lent out to tether those into the mobile network. Net cost for the spare G1 to me was $35. Leftover iPhones? More.
Great. Now spam is an anti-terrorism tool. Is there no escape?
"and a worrying precedent that judges consider social networking content to be public data."
Define 'public'. Meaning those you allow to see it is the more accurate, and operative, definition. Even if that is one.
If you post on Facebook to your ONE friend, you might make a case that it's not 'public'.
If you post on Facebook to your TWO Friends, you are on more tenuous ground.
If you have more than TWO friends on Facebook, you are no longer so 'private'.
Benjamin Frankline once posited:
"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
I've read of several cases where facebook posts were used in court, to the significant disadvantage of the poster. Some of the examples are genuinely disappointing, and the complaints about abuse and lack of privacy are shallow and not convincing.
If you have a secret, you should consider keeping it a secret. Really. Postings on any retrievable media are going to be sought for, and if they are found, you're stuck with them.
Perhaps the most significant impact of the Internet and the eas of sharing information is in the area of public records, which before the Internet were actually anything but 'public'. Now court records, tax and real estate records, and more are a few clicks away. Turns out, 'public' records are not so appreciated when it's your ox that is gored. Not that this attitude is anything new.
Forget 'nothing on the web is "private" '. Nothing you write and leave somewhere else is private. Nothing you do in the presence of another is private.
They are legitimizig the media industries' attempt to suppress a protocol's use by marginalizing it. In a small way first, but the camel's nose in under the tent flap.
Bittorrent is entirely useful for downloading ISOs of Linux distributions, encrypted data shared lawfully betweeen any number of parties, and other uses.
If this reasoning were expanded to a simple, logical conclusion, encryption would be illegal for regular people like me to use - since criminals use it to disguise their activities, it can't be permitted for use by anyone except those who can demonstrate a genuine need, and are above reproach. Not a lot of complaints from the media conglomerates about Akamai, for instance.
First they came for Napster,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't using it.
Then they came for LimeWire,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't usign that either.
Then they came for Pirate Bay,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a pirater.
Then they came for Spotify,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't in Europe.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Yes, and my level 283 Ninja is a lot more fun than your level 546 Scavi. Deal with it.
Pretty funny. It's recursive. I wonder where it started...
Here...
Is CmdrTaco really as lazy as I am? That, my friends, is sad.
"spam now accounts for 78.6 percent of all email traffic"
"March 2009, when the global spam rate was 75.7 percent of all email traffic"
"January 2010, when the spam rate was 83.9% of all email traffic."
BS. If you carefully define spam, you can get close to those numbers. My server is rejecting 94% of incoming mail outright, either from banned domains and IP ranges, or obvious spams in subjects, or fictitious senders, or redirects that are 100% spam. NO complaints from any of the users that they are missing legitimate email, and my hosts.deny and reject files are getting really big. Blocking .cn, .ro, and .cz is a good start, for you beginners. I don't share my blocks beyond that, some of them get irritated when I call them spammers, even if they are.
Of what passes the initial filtering, 60% of THAT fails Spamassassin tests, and another 10-15% fails blacklists. I'm only one user, but it appears that I get around 15,000 messages a day to my address, with about 900 or so getting to Spamassassin, and I see about 20-30 a day that are not spam, with 10 or so that get through. From 1-3 false positives that are let through to me with lower scores, the same ones all the time, go figure. Jeez, actually it's worse than I thought.
I'm getting around 97% or more spam, and my email domain is unexceptional save for the fact that it's about 15 years old. So it does get a lot of spam from old, old, old lists.
If the spam experts are using younger, stronger addresses as tests, they are just avoiding the truth. If spam were only 83+%, I would be happier. But it's not. Spam is overwhelmingly the vast majority of email volume, worse than even the pessimists declare. Symantec can go pound it.
You don't get out much, do you?
This is similar to trying to explain why telephone service is so crappy in some part of the U.S. The Northeast, for example:
1- Weather. Ice and snow cause downed lines. Electricity is most commonly out, because the lines are highest, but phone service follows. Needless to say, when the power is out, all other services fail in a certain period of time.
2- Age. Some parts of New Jersey might have the oldest telephone cable plant in America, but the Northeast in general is probably not far behind. Maine and Vermont in particular may have really old cabling because much of the rural voice cabling is just not being updated. Overlaying it with fiber doesn't fix what is, in those areas, the last 10 miles. I had personal experience with this problem in the 70s and 80s, and some of those areas still haven't seen maintenance.
It's expensive to provide the sort of service South Korea, for example, has in the U.S. South Korea is slightly larger than Indiana with a population almost 3 times that of California. I'd rather wire that, with all the density problems involved, than to wire up the Great Plains and try to break even in the process.
And then there's culture. Wiring Manhattan probably requires skillful negotiation with any number of entities. Wiring Seoul apparently required getting up on the pole and hanging fiber and CAT5 before anyone noticed. Cable systems were not designed in the 70s & 80s to provide DOCSIS, so cable Internet is something of a compromise. ISDN did so well it was ditched for DSL, which is on what generation and still is marginal for many users? In my area, DSL is competitive with cable, but I live literally 30 feet from the DSLAM and can get a hot signal and 25MB up and down if I want to pay for it. My cable service will do it too if I spring for a DOCSIS 3 modem. My friends back in Maine live maybe 3 miles outside of a city and have no option besides the extended cable provider, and they get 2-5MB on a good day, if it stays up long enough to download anything useful. And they pay more.
The problem is economics. Monopolies, geography, marketing. Even wireless is subject to the political machinations that will delay or prevent it from being an alternative.
And South Korean users do WHAT with their copious bandwidth? Games? Facebook?
Oh, pretty much what WE do with it?
Considering 2/3 of Internet users in the US probably don't use it to read their horoscopes, unless you have a citation to offer that I can't find. That would be one.
"the machines won and put humans into the 1st Matrix..."
Naw, wrong machines. Then again, we really don't know, so it's just a matter of royalty payments, unless Fair use is invoked.
"have to find some way to work Summer Glau into it though"
More knives. No problem.
Like they didn't seem to want to try an Arduino? Pretty cheap, prety light, lots of I/O options, simple IDE, reasonable power consumption I think... There is some discussion that some Arduinos are comparable to phones in power usage.
Anyways, they are thinking of using phone chipsets, so some of the micro boards could also work. And lets also assume they won't be using phone radios, there's some savings there, but lots of other alternatives seem to be at least as good.
Besides, Arduino in space sounds a lot cooler. And it's already been done, so we can razz the Brits.
For the Matrix, prequels are more intellectual. For Star Wars, prequels are just profit
I just want to be entertained by an action flick. If I want to be moved, I'll see The King's Speech again.
There's all kinds of room for a Matrix prequel. We really don't quite know how Neo begins to question the Matrix, and of course who got out first. Or if they were just survivors from the initial enslavement. Which means another prequel to explain the rise of the machines. Oh, wait, that's another movie. No, wait, plot is pretty much the same, just change a few things and it's fine. After all, how many action plots are there? Four? Gimme another big-budget Bond movie anyways, the weapons are actually better and the villains much more believable.
If these turn out to be sequels instead, well, then they will probably explore life outside the Matrix in more detail. Grime and clever hacks sounds like another installment of Riddick, but it will be beautiful. Prequels mean more intellectualism. Sequels mean more action effects.
I'll see them. Hell, they remade Tron and nobody died out here in meatspace because of it. So far as I know.
Oh, when do we get the nedt two Star Trek movies? They need to put Vulcan back together, for starters. And Chris Pike needs his close-up.
BTW, I'm pretty sure I've got an old spline key somewhere that will jam well enough to work on these. IBM used some great stuff in typewriters...
And then there's this source.
It even haz new name, 'CamCar Ring Screw'.
They got the screw part right. I suddenly feel like I've been, well, actually I don't have an iPhone. But I will get screwed, eventually, by the CamCar Ring Screw or its ilk.
Hey, feel free to send a note of complaint to your municipality. They are usually the ones to issue exclusive contracts for service.
And your existing utilies, either electric or phone, are usually the ones renting pole space, though big cities do that too.
It's not the FCC that dictates monopolies in the cities. It's the cities.
"Verizon argues that the FCC does not have the legal authority to mandate how Internet service providers treat content on their networks".
When you put it that way, Verizon is right. Their networks are their networks.
Now, when I get Internet service from Verizon, I expect to get the Internet, unless they say otherwise in my contract, and disclaimers like network management or not impacting other users are just weasel-speak.
But this gives me hope. It is the ONLY reason I've had in a decade to get back into the ISP business. If only it didn't take a hundred million to get started. Gone are the days of a T-1 and box of modems. Now you need a GigE uplink and peering and hugely expensive border routers just to serve your half of the city.
But, again, there's opportunity there to get in and provide unfiltered Internet. It just takes enormous capital. So we are probably gonna fail.
I'm beginning to think this is a contract law issue. Make ISPs state in advance what they will or will not provide as part of their service. Vague 'network management' disclaimers should not be allowed.
Some reality checks here, ok?
Low-power processors struggle against a lot of insults. At voltages around 3v, your circuitry is susceptable to all sorts of interference. So a lot of what you're calling 'hardening' is designed in from the beginning. Differential interfaces and such help with this, and even on-chip shielding to prevent errors. This can be helpful inpreventing interference to other devices, but cannot be relied upon by itself.
FCC certification is a two-way street, as devices cannot create a nuisance, while also being able to survive in a hostile environment. For the purposes of this discussion, FCC certification ensures that the device doesn't cause egregious interference to licensed users of potentially impacted spectra. I don't think the FCC can certify that a device will cause NO interference in all circumstances, but they have standards.
Avionics are not nearly as delicate as we are lead to believe, since a lot of electronics are being left on no matter the policy. 'Turning off' your Blackberry requires removing the battery. Putting it in 'Airplane Mode' tuens off the radios, which are the worst case threats to avionics, though I doubt they are a real threat. From a practical standpoint, a raido so poorly designed and operating that it emits spurious transmissions is inefficient, and battery life is important. Just by accident, most cell phones are not going to be interfering because it's wasteful. Add to that FCC certification that requires them to play nice in their own spectrum, and I think your cell phone is less a threat than your electric razor, which is potentially a broadband jammer in the guise of a DC motor, if it uses brushes. Brushless motors will move the transmitter from spark gap to the motor control circuit. I'm wondering now if just sparking a 9volt battery would be any problem... TSA, you listening? Gotta start banning electricity. For you bad people, I'm not going to discuss tuning this thing, ok?
Overall, most devices are a lot more threatened by interference than airliner avionics. Still, I see no reason to permit transmitters to operate during takeoff and landing. At 30,000 feet, let them try and make a call. Actually, at altitude, using your cell phone is a real pain. You go through cells ever few seconds, if you get one that actually looks up at the sky.
More importantly, though, for me, is it's prudent to not permit devices to be used, not IMHO an onerous reqiurement at all, during critical flight phases. No real problem.
And yes, I have used FM radios inflight. Big woop. But I give up my cell phone, that doesn't seem to make sense. Not that important to me. Listening to FM is just a time waster, and gives me a flavor of programming across the country.
As they find ways to process MORE applications, and approve them at breakneck speed.
Google may have to defend Android and other stuff by defeating patents. Somehow, for instance, I wonder if anyone has ever built a similar architecture to Android and if they did it before the Java patents were applied for. Prior art is their best defense.
IANAL, so I can't tell if failing to defend a patent against infringment is a defense against selective prosecution. Google may be a target for several reasons, but others may have been ignored in the past.
There is little good about software patents any more. True innovation is crushed too often, and trying to re-use anything, while it's probably fundamental to patent protection, leave you wondering if anything new can be built.
It took two cups of coffee (one half-caffeinated) to get this.
First, you're here, your a Slashdotter, even if you're an AC.
I spend time here for the same reason you do - the discussion. Even busy people do things, my friend, but wasting my time is the same whether I'm busy or not. The ad hominem attack has set the stage. Already you dislike me as much as you dislike my opinions. Nice.
Citations for damages and casualties from 'war by technical maipulation of the Internet' are plentiful, so long as we limit ourselves to physical damage. Most recently, the Stuxnet worm is credited with damage to Iran's nuclear processing facilities. I use the phrase 'war by technical maipulation of the Internet' badly, I admit, because the sensitivity to the use of 'cyber' anything is great. I wonder if there were any injuries in Iran as a result of the problems with centrifuges? I don't take any pleasure in that thought, but if it did, then you have an example of casualties.
My topic is not limited to electronic warfare, but encompasses retaliation by whatever means. Certainly you can understand that if you send someone sitting next to you an insulting text message, you risk a response. Even a verbal response could be seen as an escalation. Me? I might just get up and move away, depending on the nature of the insult. But if we knew where a camp of programmers were working to do damage to U.S. utilities, for instance, at the least we might drop a 'not so smart' bomb on their Internet connection. There are exceptions, and this might not be the response in all circumstances. If you're knowledgable in this realm, you might have some better ideas,but I make a hypothetical case that does not match reality much at all. There will be no camps of programmers. They will be dispersed. Bombs won't be much use at all.
And certainly, you're wiser than to pretend that war, in and of itself, is an affront to human rights and the rule of law. You sound as if you think boxing, for example, should somehow prevent each participant from actually hurting the other. No, that isn't boxing. And there is no such thing as a 'polite' war. Yes, there is such a thing as egregious violations of human rights in war, but you'll prefer to focus on the conduct of others, I suspect.
Alas, though, now I'm disappointed, You wrote, in part;
"Why would anyone shill for anyone else in the "western hemisphere"
I get it. You got a problem with the Western Hemisphere? I understand. Yes, I really do.
I don't see the XO as an option for regions where 'get someone a job' is the most likely and desireable outcome. Mind you, I have NO idea where all the XOs go, but it was at least intended that they go where there is no electricity, no infrastructure, not much at all. That is the power of seeding computers into places where there is so little.
So in that light I don't see 'get a job' as so important as 'get an education', or 'encourage ideas'. Yes, many of these will result in getting a job, and that's good, but it's not the only good outcome, nor is it perhaps the best one, depending on circumstances.
But if getting a job is a primary goal, then how does a Windows lock-in do better than a Linux lock-in? Both offer excellent development environments, both have large markets, substantial need for applications, etc. Windows will force an XO user to repidly confront licensing and costs to expand much beyond the intial XO experience, while Linux can be done virtually for free, though distribution is the most likely cost of acquiring new software, IDEs, etc.
And if you can program in or leverage Linux, you'll do just fine with a Windows machine and a fairly short orientation period.
The XO is not intended for 'most places', so far as I knew, but if its appeal is broadening the market, great. Sounds like we may want more than one sort of XO. This is good.
ps- The Zulu will figure out how to transition from Linux to Windows. So will many people. I figured out how to transition from Windows to Linux, which seems much more difficult, even in hindsight. Now I can straddle both worlds. This would be good for nearly every XO audience.
What?