"You can use the leviathan forces of attention and enthusiasm that are swirling around Web 2.0 these days as a powerful enabler to make something important and exciting happen in your organization."
This is a fairly typical management-speak sentence but what does this actually mean? The sentence essentially boils down to a simple statement: You can use new technology as an opportunity to improve the operation of your business
No, it doesn't. While I don't much care for word choice in the previous sentence, it certainly expresses more than your summary in some respects and less in others.
The key point of the sentence is that change is made possible because of current technology buzz and excitement surrounding Web 2.0. Your summary doesn't mention attention, excitement or Web 2.0! It loses the key point entirely, and instead makes a different point: That new technologies (in general) can be used to improve business operation.
The original sentence makes no such generalization, nor does it imply that the "important and exciting" thing is related to business operation.
IMHO, your deconstruction is neither summary nor paraphrase, but a different statement entirely.
The universl service fund was established to provide phone to rural areas
For accuracy's sake, the goals of Universal Service, as mandated by the 1996 Act, are more expansive than mentioned above, and include:
promote the availability of quality services at just, reasonable, and affordable rates
increase access to advanced telecommunications services throughout the Nation
advance the availability of such services to all consumers, including those in low income, rural, insular, and high cost areas at rates that are reasonably comparable to those charged in urban areas.
insure that all schools, classrooms, health care providers, and libraries should, generally, have access to advanced telecommunications services
In general, I find these to be laudable goals and I am not opposed to paying a small tax associated with achieving them. However, should the burden of achieving these goals grow beyond my threshold of comfort, I would certainly urge my legislative representatives to revisit the 1996 decision to fund them.
Bravo. One of the most meaningful posts I've read on Slashdot in quite some time. Thank you for the refreshing voice of moderation, words of encouragement and hope.
I'd like to offer another thought that has occurred to me. THE REAL LOSERS IN THIS ELECTION:
1. McCain-Feingold. By the time the final numbers are in, this election is likely to have brought us 30% more campaign spending than any previous election. Mostly brought through 527 groups (in support of both major parties), with far less accountability or transparancy than ever before.
2. Al Qaeda. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that the great likelihood is that Al Qaeda would have preferred to inflict some type of election-disturbing attack on America, as they did in Spain and Australia. Yet the most they could accomplish was a video. Congratulations to our law enforcement and intelligence organizations for keeping the homeland safe.
I had the life-altering experience of seeing 'Joe Flies' on the big screen, at San Jose Cinequest 1999. Now I can never walk into a cinema without a wave of anxiety washing over me like a tidal wave of rotten-shrimp-and-pesto-puke. I would prefer to have my hands cut by that film rather than watch it again.
Not only was it a stupid, inane and pointless piece of self-indulgence, but when the director realized what a lump of shit he had wrought, he decided to dub over everyone's voice in a different language. Per character. Including Esperanto. And "rap language". And Pig Latin.
IANAL, but the text of this agreement seems to indicate that this implementation license applies to any products that "implement and are compliant with" Sender ID (section 1.2), and that Microsoft may subsequently terminate the license (section 3).
Anybody familiar with this? Is there a RFC for Sender ID?
1. You know he will be there when you need something.
2. Otherwise, you'd never know he was there.
I disagree with the above post.
For my $.02, management is the skill (art?) of achieving through others. I want my manager to provide an environment where I am motivated, challenged, successful and rewarded. I want to feel his presence and to see that he is structuring the team in a way that can achieve success.
I imagine most everyone's been on a team with someone who badly needed to be trained hard, demoted or fired. I wouldn't want my manager to get out of the way of that. For me, the very best manager is the one from whom I can learn: learn new skills, improve my skills and possibly even get a better perspective on what I want in my career.
What questions can I ask to help me determine if this is that kind of manager? I'm not sure, but here are some ideas:
What measures do you take to help grow your employees skills and careers?
What are some different ways that you've structured teams to achieve success? Has your experience suggested
Do you find that different personality types require significantly different management styles? What personality types are your favorite to manage? Which are your biggest challenges>
What is are some of the qualities of your "dream employee"
I hear this sentiment expressed far too often, and it discourages that so many people think this way. I submit to you that if your primary motivation for education is to obtain a higher salary or prove something to a prospective future employer, you've greatly undervalued that education. Pursuit of knowledge should be for YOU, not some future employer.
Higher education represents a unique opportunity to engage with experts of all fields, to gain insight into a great diversity of disciplines and to discover where your own interests are. Your primary benefit from college is the personal enrichment you receive from education: understanding and appreciation of complexity & subtlety, insight into yourself and a desire for life-long learning.
And finally, off the actual topic: let's watch the Slashdot effect in action! When I first hit the Taipei Times article, it included this text at the bottom: This story has been viewed 1128 times.
First try: "connection refused"
Second try: 1128 times.
Perhaps the web counter has been destroyed by a trojan horse developed by China!
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 1
But if everyone were to use Bayesian I swear we wouldn't even have to propose a new protocol, talk about new legislation, etc.
I love my Bayesian filter, but I am not nearly so optimistic as you. I suspect that Bayesian filtering won't protect us for very long. It's only recently been popularly deployed, and already I've started receiving spams that quite nicely bypass my Bayesian filters: seems that some of my spammers have been including a few hundred (pseudo?-)random english words from the dictionary. The quantity of random words actually exceeds the quantity of spam. They are rendered HTML invisible through a variety of techniques. My Bayesian filter Spamassassin doesn't recognize these messages as very spammy, and they are starting to slip through.
I suspect that as spammers get smarter about Bayesian analysis that they will find tokens that register as non-spammy for a large percentage of the population. And as we implement measures to discriminate against those tokens, spammers will migrate to a new set, and so on and so on and we'll discover that Bayesian filtering is just another round in the fight between spammers and... well... everyone else.
Before you price HDTVs, consider that you'll probably want a larger screen than you've had in the past:
HDTV is designed to provide a much more immersive television viewing experience: the wider screen should fill more of the viewer's peripheral vision, and the detailed picture will frequently exceed the visual acuity of the viewer at traditional TV-vieweing distances. The Society of Motion Picture Television Engineers (SMTPE) recommends that viewers sit *much* closer to the television when watching HDTV:
For traditional 4:3 televisions, recommended viewing distance was seven screen-heights (heights, not diagonals) away from the screen. For a 34"-diag screen, that's just under 12 feet. But for HDTV, SMPTE recommends a viewing distance of just four screen-heights. When comparing against a diagonal distance, this is compounded by the squatter 16:9 aspect ratio: For a 34" widescreen HDTV set, that's about 5' 6" away from the screen. If you want to buy a new HDTV and keep your sofa 12' away, SMPTE says you'll want a 73" screen.
Of course, there was no way to change stations. I considered briefly the notion of building a machine from mindstorms that would push the radio's preset buttons
Take a look at lirc. For about US $1, you can interface an infrared transmitter to your *nix box. This will emulate almost any infrared remote control device, and thus cron could change stations on your tuner that way. If your remote isn't yet supported, then for another US $3, you can turn your box into a universal remote so lirc will memorize the sequences your tuner's remote uses and send those.
You might want to take a look at irmp3, an open source mp3 jukebox for linux designed especially for use with infrared remotes. It meets your criteria 1-4 (.ogg support is brand new, some of 5-7 and the price is right.
It seems to me that the RIAA would sure love to see the big ISP's (/ILECS) implement this type of bandwidth cap.
Not only would this squash P2P, but it would allow media companies to enter into partnerships with your ISP to provide "unmetered" downloads of paid-for content from edge servers within your ISP's network. I have to believe that there's enough business there, long-term, that the media companies would be happy to subsidize usage in the form of commissions.
Rogerborg takes a very complex issue and attempts to reduce it to a simple black-and-white statement. He defends this viewpoint in a strong tone, and is contemptuous of other viewpoints offered by slashdot readers.
IANAL, so instead of arguing the point, I present this post as a list of expert opinions which contradict Rogerborg's position.
Rogerborg:
Look, I'll spell it out again, shall I? There is no clause in fair use, there never has been one, that allows fair use for anything other than: (1) criticism and comment, (2) parody and satire, (3) scholarship and research, (4) news reporting and (5) teaching. To qualify for consideration under the fair use defence, your use must fall into these categories. You don't even get to argue the "negligible impact" until you've shown that you qualify. There is no case zero. There is no case six.
According to the EFF, this list of fair use activities is "not to be construed as exclusive or limiting in any way."
Current national security advisor Condoleezza Rice authored a paper on fair use in 1988, in which she states "The concept of fair use is necessarily somewhat vague when discussed in the abstract. Its application depends critically on the particular facts of the individual situation. Neither the case law nor the statutory law provides bright lines concerning which uses are fair and which are not."
As mentioned in the previous post, the
Sony vs. Universal City Studios Case contradicts Rogerborg's black-and-white interpretation of section 107, as it defines time-shifting television programs as fair use.
Previous case law has held that the following are fair uses of copyrighted materials:
Making personal backups of software.
Time-shifting television programs.
Format-shifting.
Compilation creation ("mix tapes")
Rebroadcasting radio in a business.
In short, a wide body of experts seem to disagree with the viewpoint espoused by Rogerborg. I exhort you to consider this when reading his posts. I further ask that you consider that he was willing to defend his viewpoint so vehemently in spite of the contradictory expert viewpoints readily available.
Just took a quick look at the Smoothwall FAQ and I have to say that you appear to be correct about Mr. Morrell's attitude:
The FAQ devotes 32 of 88 pages to how to correctly interact with the community, with such topics as "On Not Reacting Like a Loser" and "RTFM and STFW: How to tell you've seriously screwed up."
Furthermore, the remaining 56 pages are liberally sprinkled with the same: "Asking this question on the mailing list or IRC will inevitably result in the verbal equivalent of being hit round the head with a baseball bat. The answer is NO."
While I appreciate the sentiment of these statements, devoting nearly half of the document to this topic might be a little overboard.
According to their web page, it's a DS-3 connection to the ISP, not an OC-3. I'd like to know how many connections share that pipe so that we can compare services with competitive residential offerings. The website mentions an internet cafe and a 40-drop computer lab.
One more thing: I especially dislike the name, since it conjures images of Thoreau sequestering himself away from the bustle of society (rather than paying extra for a multi-megabit connection to the rest of the world).
- I went to the web because I wished to live deliberately...
Don't bother with fibre. It's not going to get used. People have been saying "fibre is the next big thing" for 5 years now - and cable just keeps catching up
Ugh. While I was as pleased as anyone that we were able to extend the functionality of twisted-pair to 125Mhz(Cat 5e) and 250Mhz(Cat 6), it's a pity that this has been widely interpreted as a sign that twisted-pair copper will indefinitely keep pace with fiber.
This just isn't true, and the sorry fact is that although cat-6 is in the marketplace, it only doubles the bandwidth of cat-5e, and at a premium cost (with today's run rates). Even worse: the few remaining communication standards intiatives that were planning on using cat-6, like 1000BASE-TX (not 1000BASE-T!), have lost all momentum in the marketplace. Simultaneously, dozens of new standards have been announced or delivered for fiber. AFAIK, there currently isn't much development behind any copper-based high bandwidth standards. Most of the new high-bandwidth technologies aren't even looking at copper. 10GB Ethernet, for example, is defined as a fiber-only technology. And there are dozens of new high-speed projects on fiber, from 10GE through 2G/10G Fibrechannel to DWDM.
Video over Cat5 is cheap
If you're talking about NTSC over twisted-pair, I'd recommend against it. I notice significant rollof of high frequencies with high-quality baluns on Cat 6. Cat 5 is much worse. Coax is still the cable of choice for video. On the other hand, if you're talking about video over ethernet or some other form of (presumably MPEG) distribution, sure this will work great if you have ethernet-enabled video equipment. My TV isn't.
Hi definition uncompressed video is more than 100Mb/sec - but 1Gb/sec over copper is on the horizon.
Uncompressed HDTV is about 1.5Gbps. 1Gbps ethernet over copper has been shipping for over a year: 802.3ab
Bottom line: For my money, I'd install a duplex of multimode fiber to each room. It's not significantly more expensive than Cat-6, and it's guaranteed to have a longer life.
For those of you interested in the history of marsupial carnivores in general, be sure to check out the work of Dr. Steven Wroe, of the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney.
He has written several articles (many available online) describing some truly intimidating marsupials from our past including marsupial tigers, wolves, lions and sabre-tooths.
Re:A PS2 with different games
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 1
djrogers said:
There is a _major_ difference - the PS2 won't/can't do any resolutions above the NTSC standard 480i. That looks like crap on anything bigger than a 32" tube TV
Hmmm... this sounds like an oversimplification. If I'm not mistaken, SMPTE recommends that picture quality observations relying upon visual acuity be taken from a distance of 6-8 screen heights away from the television. So, in the case of 480i on a 32" screen, you should expect it to look pretty sharp at, say, 18 feet away.
This is the principle that allows a Jumbotron to look great in a ballpark even with a relatively low-resolution signal.
Well, of course, FDR was dead when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, so the subject of your message is misleading. However, this is what Harry Truman said:
"It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware."
I am an American who has lived in Japan and loved Japan. I wholeheartedly agree with President Truman's decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, even when considered from today's historical perspective.
1. You can't buy a T1 from any telco for $15/month
2. You can sure as hell get a set of copper wires for ~ $15/month, depending on the distance and area. Browse your telco's website and look for tariff circuit rates.
3. You're right, the phone company hasn't run a wire from your house to all your friends' houses.
4. What they did instead was build a structured cabling system so they connect point x to point y with patch cords. This is what you buy for $cheap.
5. Despite the original posters claims, you *can* run a T1 with 2 sets of premises equipment, provided at least one of them will supply a clock. Most do. These days you can get them for $cheap.
6. Depending on the quality of the circuit, expect to achieve 5000-6000 feet.
7. Want to go farther? Find a friend who lives closer and install a T1 repeater (also $cheap) in his garage. Then buy another circuit to the next location.
Maybe I just don't get it... what exactly are they trying to accomplish here? "Hey all you record labels! Time to get happy! Call off your lawyers because we're still going to let our users pirate your songs, but they can only give them away if they actually bought your CD! Oh, sure they can still give away billions of copies - but those people can't pirate them! Until they crack our protection algorithm which we think they pretty much will, because if we change the file format too much then it breaks every MP3 player ever made. Oh, and even if they don't crack our file format, they sure as hell will Digital-Analog-Digital the songs and redistribute them that way."
My take on this: Napster ignores lawsuits until they have huge market. Napster gets huge market. Napster redefines onlines music from.MP3 to.NAP and licenses player technology. THEN (and only then) Napster takes steps to bill consumers for downloads in small-easy-to-swallow-prices and cuts profit-sharing deals with labels.
Slashdot Mirror
The key point of the sentence is that change is made possible because of current technology buzz and excitement surrounding Web 2.0. Your summary doesn't mention attention, excitement or Web 2.0! It loses the key point entirely, and instead makes a different point: That new technologies (in general) can be used to improve business operation.
The original sentence makes no such generalization, nor does it imply that the "important and exciting" thing is related to business operation.
IMHO, your deconstruction is neither summary nor paraphrase, but a different statement entirely.
For accuracy's sake, the goals of Universal Service, as mandated by the 1996 Act, are more expansive than mentioned above, and include:
promote the availability of quality services at just, reasonable, and affordable rates
increase access to advanced telecommunications services throughout the Nation
advance the availability of such services to all consumers, including those in low income, rural, insular, and high cost areas at rates that are reasonably comparable to those charged in urban areas.
insure that all schools, classrooms, health care providers, and libraries should, generally, have access to advanced telecommunications services
In general, I find these to be laudable goals and I am not opposed to paying a small tax associated with achieving them. However, should the burden of achieving these goals grow beyond my threshold of comfort, I would certainly urge my legislative representatives to revisit the 1996 decision to fund them.
I'd like to offer another thought that has occurred to me. THE REAL LOSERS IN THIS ELECTION:
1. McCain-Feingold. By the time the final numbers are in, this election is likely to have brought us 30% more campaign spending than any previous election. Mostly brought through 527 groups (in support of both major parties), with far less accountability or transparancy than ever before.
2. Al Qaeda. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that the great likelihood is that Al Qaeda would have preferred to inflict some type of election-disturbing attack on America, as they did in Spain and Australia. Yet the most they could accomplish was a video. Congratulations to our law enforcement and intelligence organizations for keeping the homeland safe.
Not only was it a stupid, inane and pointless piece of self-indulgence, but when the director realized what a lump of shit he had wrought, he decided to dub over everyone's voice in a different language. Per character. Including Esperanto. And "rap language". And Pig Latin.
Oh god. I'm shaking.
IANAL, but the text of this agreement seems to indicate that this implementation license applies to any products that "implement and are compliant with" Sender ID (section 1.2), and that Microsoft may subsequently terminate the license (section 3).
Anybody familiar with this? Is there a RFC for Sender ID?
For my $.02, management is the skill (art?) of achieving through others. I want my manager to provide an environment where I am motivated, challenged, successful and rewarded. I want to feel his presence and to see that he is structuring the team in a way that can achieve success.
I imagine most everyone's been on a team with someone who badly needed to be trained hard, demoted or fired. I wouldn't want my manager to get out of the way of that. For me, the very best manager is the one from whom I can learn: learn new skills, improve my skills and possibly even get a better perspective on what I want in my career.
What questions can I ask to help me determine if this is that kind of manager? I'm not sure, but here are some ideas:
What measures do you take to help grow your employees skills and careers?
What are some different ways that you've structured teams to achieve success? Has your experience suggested
Do you find that different personality types require significantly different management styles? What personality types are your favorite to manage? Which are your biggest challenges>
What is are some of the qualities of your "dream employee"
How do you handle a team-wrecker?
Just some ideas....
Higher education represents a unique opportunity to engage with experts of all fields, to gain insight into a great diversity of disciplines and to discover where your own interests are. Your primary benefit from college is the personal enrichment you receive from education: understanding and appreciation of complexity & subtlety, insight into yourself and a desire for life-long learning.
Second try: 1128 times.
Perhaps the web counter has been destroyed by a trojan horse developed by China!
I suspect that as spammers get smarter about Bayesian analysis that they will find tokens that register as non-spammy for a large percentage of the population. And as we implement measures to discriminate against those tokens, spammers will migrate to a new set, and so on and so on and we'll discover that Bayesian filtering is just another round in the fight between spammers and... well... everyone else.
HDTV is designed to provide a much more immersive television viewing experience: the wider screen should fill more of the viewer's peripheral vision, and the detailed picture will frequently exceed the visual acuity of the viewer at traditional TV-vieweing distances. The Society of Motion Picture Television Engineers (SMTPE) recommends that viewers sit *much* closer to the television when watching HDTV:
For traditional 4:3 televisions, recommended viewing distance was seven screen-heights (heights, not diagonals) away from the screen. For a 34"-diag screen, that's just under 12 feet. But for HDTV, SMPTE recommends a viewing distance of just four screen-heights. When comparing against a diagonal distance, this is compounded by the squatter 16:9 aspect ratio: For a 34" widescreen HDTV set, that's about 5' 6" away from the screen. If you want to buy a new HDTV and keep your sofa 12' away, SMPTE says you'll want a 73" screen.
You might want to take a look at irmp3, an open source mp3 jukebox for linux designed especially for use with infrared remotes. It meets your criteria 1-4 (.ogg support is brand new, some of 5-7 and the price is right.
Not only would this squash P2P, but it would allow media companies to enter into partnerships with your ISP to provide "unmetered" downloads of paid-for content from edge servers within your ISP's network. I have to believe that there's enough business there, long-term, that the media companies would be happy to subsidize usage in the form of commissions.
There's more about this concept in a recent article from Cringely.
IANAL, so instead of arguing the point, I present this post as a list of expert opinions which contradict Rogerborg's position.
According to the EFF, this list of fair use activities is "not to be construed as exclusive or limiting in any way."Current national security advisor Condoleezza Rice authored a paper on fair use in 1988, in which she states "The concept of fair use is necessarily somewhat vague when discussed in the abstract. Its application depends critically on the particular facts of the individual situation. Neither the case law nor the statutory law provides bright lines concerning which uses are fair and which are not."
As mentioned in the previous post, the Sony vs. Universal City Studios Case contradicts Rogerborg's black-and-white interpretation of section 107, as it defines time-shifting television programs as fair use.
Previous case law has held that the following are fair uses of copyrighted materials:
Making personal backups of software.
Time-shifting television programs.
Format-shifting.
Compilation creation ("mix tapes")
Rebroadcasting radio in a business.
In short, a wide body of experts seem to disagree with the viewpoint espoused by Rogerborg. I exhort you to consider this when reading his posts. I further ask that you consider that he was willing to defend his viewpoint so vehemently in spite of the contradictory expert viewpoints readily available.
dp
The FAQ devotes 32 of 88 pages to how to correctly interact with the community, with such topics as "On Not Reacting Like a Loser" and "RTFM and STFW: How to tell you've seriously screwed up."
Furthermore, the remaining 56 pages are liberally sprinkled with the same: "Asking this question on the mailing list or IRC will inevitably result in the verbal equivalent of being hit round the head with a baseball bat. The answer is NO."
While I appreciate the sentiment of these statements, devoting nearly half of the document to this topic might be a little overboard.
One more thing: I especially dislike the name, since it conjures images of Thoreau sequestering himself away from the bustle of society (rather than paying extra for a multi-megabit connection to the rest of the world).
- I went to the web because I wished to live deliberately...
Ugh. While I was as pleased as anyone that we were able to extend the functionality of twisted-pair to 125Mhz(Cat 5e) and 250Mhz(Cat 6), it's a pity that this has been widely interpreted as a sign that twisted-pair copper will indefinitely keep pace with fiber.
This just isn't true, and the sorry fact is that although cat-6 is in the marketplace, it only doubles the bandwidth of cat-5e, and at a premium cost (with today's run rates). Even worse: the few remaining communication standards intiatives that were planning on using cat-6, like 1000BASE-TX (not 1000BASE-T!), have lost all momentum in the marketplace.
Simultaneously, dozens of new standards have been announced or delivered for fiber. AFAIK, there currently isn't much development behind any copper-based high bandwidth standards. Most of the new high-bandwidth technologies aren't even looking at copper. 10GB Ethernet, for example, is defined as a fiber-only technology. And there are dozens of new high-speed projects on fiber, from 10GE through 2G/10G Fibrechannel to DWDM.
Video over Cat5 is cheap
If you're talking about NTSC over twisted-pair, I'd recommend against it. I notice significant rollof of high frequencies with high-quality baluns on Cat 6. Cat 5 is much worse. Coax is still the cable of choice for video.
On the other hand, if you're talking about video over ethernet or some other form of (presumably MPEG) distribution, sure this will work great if you have ethernet-enabled video equipment. My TV isn't.
Hi definition uncompressed video is more than 100Mb/sec - but 1Gb/sec over copper is on the horizon.
Uncompressed HDTV is about 1.5Gbps. 1Gbps ethernet over copper has been shipping for over a year: 802.3ab
Bottom line: For my money, I'd install a duplex of multimode fiber to each room. It's not significantly more expensive than Cat-6, and it's guaranteed to have a longer life.
Huh? The diminutive form is one letter longer than the original?
Diminutive, not contracted, abbreviated or shortened. English equivalents:
John:Johnny
Mark:Marky
Paul:Paulie
Nothing unusual to see here. Move along...
He has written several articles (many available online) describing some truly intimidating marsupials from our past including marsupial tigers, wolves, lions and sabre-tooths.
Hmmm... this sounds like an oversimplification.
If I'm not mistaken, SMPTE recommends that picture quality observations relying upon visual acuity be taken from a distance of 6-8 screen heights away from the television. So, in the case of 480i on a 32" screen, you should expect it to look pretty sharp at, say, 18 feet away.
This is the principle that allows a Jumbotron to look great in a ballpark even with a relatively low-resolution signal.
dp
"It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware."
I am an American who has lived in Japan and loved Japan. I wholeheartedly agree with President Truman's decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, even when considered from today's historical perspective.
1. You can't buy a T1 from any telco for $15/month
2. You can sure as hell get a set of copper wires for ~ $15/month, depending on the distance and area. Browse your telco's website and look for tariff circuit rates.
3. You're right, the phone company hasn't run a wire from your house to all your friends' houses.
4. What they did instead was build a structured cabling system so they connect point x to point y with patch cords. This is what you buy for $cheap.
5. Despite the original posters claims, you *can* run a T1 with 2 sets of premises equipment, provided at least one of them will supply a clock. Most do. These days you can get them for $cheap.
6. Depending on the quality of the circuit, expect to achieve 5000-6000 feet.
7. Want to go farther? Find a friend who lives closer and install a T1 repeater (also $cheap) in his garage. Then buy another circuit to the next location.
Maybe I just don't get it... what exactly are they trying to accomplish here? .MP3 to .NAP and licenses player technology. THEN (and only then) Napster takes steps to bill consumers for downloads in small-easy-to-swallow-prices and cuts profit-sharing deals with labels.
"Hey all you record labels! Time to get happy! Call off your lawyers because we're still going to let our users pirate your songs, but they can only give them away if they actually bought your CD! Oh, sure they can still give away billions of copies - but those people can't pirate them! Until they crack our protection algorithm which we think they pretty much will, because if we change the file format too much then it breaks every MP3 player ever made. Oh, and even if they don't crack our file format, they sure as hell will Digital-Analog-Digital the songs and redistribute them that way."
My take on this: Napster ignores lawsuits until they have huge market. Napster gets huge market. Napster redefines onlines music from