I suggest getting a credit report from each of the three reporting companies, and staggering your requests by four months. I do that and get a picture of the report on a regular basis. I wish the law required them to provide a convenient way to lock your report, I see 50-60 requests a year from people I never heard of or dealt with, they're in a "just looking" report, and I'm sure they're people trying to pick identities worth stealing.
FOIL allows reasonable copying costs, and the city is (and was) in the process of making the laws available online. The company doing the conversion will also sell a copy of the laws, annotated and indexed, with their software. That copy is copyright automatically at the instant of creation, as is anything else they or you create. I see no credible report that reasonable access was denied, and the laws in open format will be online when the conversion is complete.
The local paper, which spent many $100k on naming rights to the local arena, thought that $200 for a copyright copy of laws, with software, was worth a story. And since "City putting laws online for better public access" doesn't have much buzz, the story was spun to imply that people couldn't see the laws without spending hundreds. I really thought they were a better paper than that.
Full disclosure, I live three blocks from city hall, the laws are there during business hours, are at the libraries noted about 80 hours/week, and are as readily available as is typical for a small town. Having the laws online is an indication of more open government, not less.
I'm with you, I'm trying to find a Linux TV application for a group (I support their servers to some extent), and the need to do database work is a stopper. Office workers do not want to hear have your dba create... These folks have been using xawtv and tvtime, but since the analog sound vanished they need a new application. They're even talking about going back to that other operating system on their desks.
They have a feed which is mixed analog and digital, with the digital requiring a SIM. Their hardware supports it, but they need an application. They want something their in-house support can install, and that pretty much means install a few RPMs, not database stuff.
Oh bomb making from Thorium is tricky as U233 has less than a 2 year half life. It is very radioactive.
Somehow I don't see that as reassuring, assuming it can be done in some practical vs. theoretical way, the people we most don't want to do that are unlikely to hold off use once it's built.
Thing is, they were the first to tell you they had no clue how or why they could dowse out water, but they could.
Sorry, until you've got a controlled study showing your little "witches" perform better than random chance, I'm gonna remain skeptical. Meanwhile, you should send one over to JREF... if her "powers" are real, she could win a million bucks!
Randi is (was?) an entertainer, not a scientist. His public "debunkings" have included such science as "if I can duplicate the effect through trickery it's fake" regardless of zero evidence that any such trickery was originally used. That's not a "controlled study," he starts with a known result.
I knew Delbert Merrill socially, he was an inventor and engineer who had a long career in industry. He tried dowsing when water couldn't be found on a property, and was successful. He developed a method swinging a pendulum over a map, and it seemed to work for him.
One night we were visiting him, and he showed us his rod. Two nylon rods, about two feet long and 0.1 inch diameter, similar to the nylon rods used to bind computer listings in those days. The business end was bound with non-metalic material, I think fishing line, and the hand grips were 1/4 inch bakelite (or similar) rigid non-conducting tubing, and the ends of the nylon had just been kinked 90 degrees to keep the handles from falling off. There was no way someone holding those bakelite handles could apply bend or torsion to those rods.
He walked across the property, saying that there was a stream in the area, and as he walked along the rods visibly bent. He offered to let us try it, and two of three people felt the tug, including me. The other person who had success was blind, could not have seen where the rods bent, and also got a strong bend at the same spot.
I never tried dowsing again, but Delbert Merrill did locate water on some property I was trying to buy, after three dry wells had been drilled. He predicted slight sulpher in the water, in an area not known for that, and predicted the depth within five feet and the flow within three gal/min.
I see that in upstate NY National Grid finds gas lines by dowsing as well as their little meters, the meters have false positives on any metal, not just gas lines. The sum of these experiences strongly suggests that there is an effect, sensible people like gas companies and engineers seem to find it usefully reliable, I wouldn't discard their experience casually.
Finally, Randi is an entertainer, some of the televised "debunkings" are far from scientific method:
- everyone can't reproduce the effect
- it doesn't work every time
- the effect can be created as an illusion by a professional
If those are valid criteria, they prove that pitchers can't throw a curve. Personally I'll put it in the "there's something there" category, since the people I have met who have produced measureable success make no money at it, don't care if people believe in it, and don't publicize the ability, I find profit, zeal, or fame to be unlikely motivation for trickery.
GPS and computer maps are still only "best effort" information, there was an article about both Google and Mapquest routing people down a flight of stairs, and Google in NJ had us following a road which ended at a cow pasture. The tech to match satellite photos to map data, as a sanity check, seems to have a way to go.
I'd also like to see optical media go away. Burns take too long, are too likely not to work on another drive or even the same drive, have one little bad spot that spoils everything, and drives go bad all the time. I'll take SSDs over DVD-RWs. Wish more Linux distros were set up for easy installation onto and from flash memory drives.
livecdtools will take bootable install media and put them on USB flash nicely. At least for the distributions I use.
At least not that my hardware, home improvement, or lighting store can find. What I need is a 1:1 replacement for common 40/60w bulbs, and all I find is incompatible odd shapes which are only "compatible" in base size. I have spent a great deal of time and money keeping the original 1880s Victorian fixtures going, and many have original shades which clip on the bulb itself.
"Looks sorta like a light bulb" doesn't cut it, I use CFL where I can, and halogen floodlights in some places, but most of my bulbs are regular incandescent. The new GE high efficiency, long life, incandescents may very well serve, they are close to CFL in performance.
Reports seem to indicate that the reason H1N1 is dangerous is that people who are young adults are most likely to get really sick, because their immune systems react too strongly to the flu. Not unlike histamine reactions, it's a case of too much of a good thing.
The premise of using death rate as a metric is where I find the flaw, a vaccine is intended to prevent the disease, and that should be measurable by checking the verified infection rates in vaccinated and non-vaccinated populations with similar health, income, and exposure factors. The cost of having a worker or caregiver home sick would justify the cost of prevention in most cases. Add the cost saving of reduced spread rates for the infection and you don't need to argue mortality rates to justify a vaccination policy.
However most UNIX-like OS support connection binding. You can do this with Linux or BSD for sure, the problem is that the binding needs to be in place on both ends, you can't have a fast transfer rate to an arbitrary non-participating site. I used to have an ISP who let me bind multiple dial-up connections to his DSLAM, which did give fast connection to the outside world, but it wasn't a telco ISP. I could do it in the hours when he always had many unused ports, like 1am-6am, etc. But it still took two cooperating end points, it was just that one was a DSLAM.
You seem to have gotten other useful information, and you can also do it through multiple vpn connections, although I know of no remotely automated way to do it, I used to make the two connections and then run a script, aggregating a DSL and cable connection.
My feeling is that it's enough trouble do be of limited value, but it can be done, which was your original question.
This table of shell datashows some of the previous technology. I'm not convinced that by the time you build this, with a final stage rocket and guidance system, that it will be quite as cheap as implied. And the final stage needs to be really reliable, other nations would get upset if the payload didn't make it to orbit and big chunks of rocket fuel started coming down on them. And if the final stage doesn't work right, the [DESTRUCT] option might not, either.
My personal favorite is rail car to SCRAMJET ignition speed, airplane tech to get up to 50-70k ft and then one rocket stage to go to LEO. You don't need to lift the oxidizer (using air), you use aerodynamic lift initially, with a high lift to thrust efficiency, and the g-forces could be kept lower than any short duration impulse (gun) launcher.
I think we're closer to having the technology, too.
The FCC allows transmitters below a certain power level, and transmissions on certain very high frequencies without license. There is a PDF doc on that, and a discussion on the ARLL site which shed light on this.
Not all transmitters need be licensed, not even all operated, although if they are commercial products they must be registered. That's why some devices have the legend This product does not emit any RF at power levels or frequencies regulated by the FCC instead of an FCC number.
There's a ton of detail at those two links which clarify that there are some unregulated areas, although they are not where you would use them for blocking cell phones.
It seems that Mr Lynch wants to redefine bandwidth from the current meaning Verizon uses to charge more for faster connections (ie. transfer rate), to meaning usage (bytes transferred), for which they would also like to charge. In fact, it seems that all of the "providers" want to be paid for existing, and then overcharge for anyone who want to actually use their connection.
This is the same Verizon which first dropped all binary groups from their usenet offering, because about 1% of the groups might have contained porn, then dropped the groups completely. In both cases they said that their TOS allowed them to drop any service without lowering price or considering that a a breach of contract. They have terms of service which don't actually require them to provide anything, other than a monthly bill. This is Verizon which now blocks access to non-Verizon eMail providers unless they use a Verizon approved protocol instead of the standard POP3/SMTP protocols.
When I was in server support for Prodigy/SBC we simply whitelisted people for port 25 (SMTP) at the POP, Verizon doesn't seem to care, they explicitly have "no exceptions." Or for $300/mo you can get a real connection to the Internet from them
When I first saw the "rings" in the original 386 CPU, I thought MULTICS. I was around then, it was developed on a GE-645 computer, and I used PL/1 for a while (and would love subset G for Linux). Didn't know it was open sourced, maybe someone would start a project to get it on available hardware.
I heard from Steve Hobbs years ago that someone was trying to get an emulator for for the GE-235/265 going, so it could run DTSS, the first widely available commercial time sharing.
If someone is doing this I'd like to know, I certainly would like to help, even if it was done with a GE-645 hardware emulator it would be interesting. The emulator would be more fun, since it could run DTSS-II, GECOME, GTSS, etc, etc. That was all 36 bit hardware, of course, so it would benefit from some 64 bit hardware to make it usefully fast.
These kids will be "lucky" if this only sets back their educational growth by the length of the program, rather than messing up their whole expectation of education and fun. I fear someone has taken the idea of self directed learning, and instead of allowing students to choose their own path through the required facts and methods, with provision of some optional material, the idea of "fun" has crept in, and unfortunately this leads the students to conclude that when it ceases to be fun they can stop doing it.
Self directed learning can greatly speed education, particularly for smart students who read well, some of my offspring have benefited from it. But it isn't made fun so much as made interesting, which is quite another characteristic.
There are people who have never had a good idea in their lives, but love paperwork, chasing financing, licensing, marketing, filing reports with the various governments... find one (with some track record of success, please), even marry one (I did), but do not under any pressure try to do it yourself. You will not only be bad at it, you will hate, despise, abhor, it.
You have an idea and a patent, get a business person to take it from here. The lowest hassle path is licensing, let someone else figure out how to use, make, and market you gadget. And often surprise, someone else will find a use you never dreamed of, and pay you money with little effort on your part.
The secret of life seems to be to find a way to make enough money to be comfortable while doing something fun. And unless your idea of fun is constant non-creative wading through the swamps of paperwork and regulations business has become, let someone else do the nasty part. And by licensing you get a very high $/pain ratio. You also have time to work on the next big idea, instead of going to meeting.
Although I carry a camera with me virtually everywhere I go, I rarely get a picture of any transient phenomena lasting less than six seconds. Unless you have the camera ready to go it's unlikely that you will get a picture, particularly a clear and unambiguous picture, of anything lasting only a few seconds, due to your reaction and camera startup time. Add to that the phenomena being rare, and often in conjunction with a lightning strike, and it's not surprising that there isn't much in the way of images, and what exists is subject to interpretation.
Anyone who has been really close to a lightning strike knows that you probably spend a few seconds on "That was close!" (or "Holy shit!"), followed a quick inventory of functional body parts with particular attention to bladder control. Then anything you have seen in those seconds gets processed for action.
When I was at GE Corp R&D, the names of the day were New York waterways. Thus the large fileservers were Hudson and Mohawk, smaller systems were Alplaus, Esopus, etc.
Individual groups used their own themes, such as fish, large (Whale), desktop (trout, halibut), and network connected devices (chum). After installing a group of servers for one particularly unpleasant manager, and being told that "naming is your job, not mine," I used the body fluids theme, and called them mucus, snot, vomit, and drool.
The software is deterministic. Therefore it is not the software which creates the output, but the user, the questioner. Ask the same question, get the same answer. The software is a tool, much as the brush for a painter, or the chisel for a sculptor. Control over the output is in the hands of the question, and therefore the creator is, and should be, the author.
I can't see this claim standing up to even a moderately well-financed challenge.
Where is the problem with exclusivity? And where is it written that a service must be sold with the price set to the cost?
Exclusivity is a valid and widely used tool for marketing. Supermarkets have "house brands," stores like WalMart and Radio Shack have their own brands, why is it worse in some way to have an item, say the iPhone, available from only one carrier? If you want the phone you go to the carrier. And if iPhone were available on all carriers the Android phones wouldn't have taken off as fast, and now the consumer has two smart phone operating systems to choose, and one is on hardware from many vendors.
Text pricing seems to be another competitive area, some vendors charge by the message, some have a bundle, some like Boost include unlimited text, etc. And dare I say it, as the price goes up people use it less and the market adjusts the price, like gasoline, caviar, or any other item. Text cost will follow the same curve as long distance, unlimited will be a selling point and the price will fall. Without the need for yet more complex laws.
It's all about choice, and cost, and there's plenty of room to make a choice of phone, carrier, and plan, without having the government decide what we are ofrfered and setting the price.
I have been using a combination of verified writes and dvdisaster to hold my important data. And for CDs they can not only be verified, but checked with C2 scans to see if the "correct" readback requires ECC at the sector level, or if the initial burn is successful.
Your irreplaceable pool is larger than mine, my really critical stuff fits on a pair of DL DVDs, so only about 14GB (I use "dvdisaster" software ECC in the images). However, I did spring for a Blu-Ray burner, which hasn't gone production yet but promises 20GB+ECC now, and possibly double that when/if 50GB media is available and affordable.
I have one more layer you don't, I inherited a large gun safe, and I have DVD backups in a small fireproof security box in that. That gives me hours of fire protection, and the data is in the format of encrypted ext2 filesystems, copies of loop mounted backup images.
The nice thing about DVDs is that they can be mailed to a secure location without needing a fast network connection.
I wonder if a standard UPS is enough isolation to mask the signal? I guess there are two types, the cheap ones which kick in when power fails, and the double conversion style, like Exide, which always convert AC to DC, then convert the DC back to AC. That let's them just add a little power during a brownout.
For all I know all of the major brands might be double conversion, but the Exide is the only one I've used which doesn't go to all battery power on low voltage.
He didn't say anything about RAID-0, he explicitly said "mirror" which is RAID-1. And the reliability of N drives becomes 1-(1-r)^N, or in layman's terms the probability of both drives failing at once. If I use your 95% figure, then reliability is 1-.05^2, or.9975. Since the probability of the software or the power supply failing is higher than that, not to worry.
The real point is that backups are to protect the data, RAID is to keep the system up if the hardware fails. In this case I think all the people who said get a backup instead are just right.
Given that there are scripts, at least in the free software world, which do this with major sites, it's not clear what you have in mind here. Video from most popular sites can be downloaded and saved, even transformed to other formats. But there is little need to do so, since the content remains online (usually).
None of this prevents use of DRM formats as well, although I doubt someone who wants their content to spread would use them. There's lots of room for everything to coexist.
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I suggest getting a credit report from each of the three reporting companies, and staggering your requests by four months. I do that and get a picture of the report on a regular basis. I wish the law required them to provide a convenient way to lock your report, I see 50-60 requests a year from people I never heard of or dealt with, they're in a "just looking" report, and I'm sure they're people trying to pick identities worth stealing.
FOIL allows reasonable copying costs, and the city is (and was) in the process of making the laws available online. The company doing the conversion will also sell a copy of the laws, annotated and indexed, with their software. That copy is copyright automatically at the instant of creation, as is anything else they or you create. I see no credible report that reasonable access was denied, and the laws in open format will be online when the conversion is complete.
The local paper, which spent many $100k on naming rights to the local arena, thought that $200 for a copyright copy of laws, with software, was worth a story. And since "City putting laws online for better public access" doesn't have much buzz, the story was spun to imply that people couldn't see the laws without spending hundreds. I really thought they were a better paper than that.
Full disclosure, I live three blocks from city hall, the laws are there during business hours, are at the libraries noted about 80 hours/week, and are as readily available as is typical for a small town. Having the laws online is an indication of more open government, not less.
I'm with you, I'm trying to find a Linux TV application for a group (I support their servers to some extent), and the need to do database work is a stopper. Office workers do not want to hear have your dba create... These folks have been using xawtv and tvtime, but since the analog sound vanished they need a new application. They're even talking about going back to that other operating system on their desks.
They have a feed which is mixed analog and digital, with the digital requiring a SIM. Their hardware supports it, but they need an application. They want something their in-house support can install, and that pretty much means install a few RPMs, not database stuff.
Oh bomb making from Thorium is tricky as U233 has less than a 2 year half life. It is very radioactive.
Somehow I don't see that as reassuring, assuming it can be done in some practical vs. theoretical way, the people we most don't want to do that are unlikely to hold off use once it's built.
Thing is, they were the first to tell you they had no clue how or why they could dowse out water, but they could.
Sorry, until you've got a controlled study showing your little "witches" perform better than random chance, I'm gonna remain skeptical. Meanwhile, you should send one over to JREF... if her "powers" are real, she could win a million bucks!
Randi is (was?) an entertainer, not a scientist. His public "debunkings" have included such science as "if I can duplicate the effect through trickery it's fake" regardless of zero evidence that any such trickery was originally used. That's not a "controlled study," he starts with a known result.
I knew Delbert Merrill socially, he was an inventor and engineer who had a long career in industry. He tried dowsing when water couldn't be found on a property, and was successful. He developed a method swinging a pendulum over a map, and it seemed to work for him.
One night we were visiting him, and he showed us his rod. Two nylon rods, about two feet long and 0.1 inch diameter, similar to the nylon rods used to bind computer listings in those days. The business end was bound with non-metalic material, I think fishing line, and the hand grips were 1/4 inch bakelite (or similar) rigid non-conducting tubing, and the ends of the nylon had just been kinked 90 degrees to keep the handles from falling off. There was no way someone holding those bakelite handles could apply bend or torsion to those rods.
He walked across the property, saying that there was a stream in the area, and as he walked along the rods visibly bent. He offered to let us try it, and two of three people felt the tug, including me. The other person who had success was blind, could not have seen where the rods bent, and also got a strong bend at the same spot.
I never tried dowsing again, but Delbert Merrill did locate water on some property I was trying to buy, after three dry wells had been drilled. He predicted slight sulpher in the water, in an area not known for that, and predicted the depth within five feet and the flow within three gal/min.
I see that in upstate NY National Grid finds gas lines by dowsing as well as their little meters, the meters have false positives on any metal, not just gas lines. The sum of these experiences strongly suggests that there is an effect, sensible people like gas companies and engineers seem to find it usefully reliable, I wouldn't discard their experience casually.
Finally, Randi is an entertainer, some of the televised "debunkings" are far from scientific method:
- everyone can't reproduce the effect
- it doesn't work every time
- the effect can be created as an illusion by a professional
If those are valid criteria, they prove that pitchers can't throw a curve. Personally I'll put it in the "there's something there" category, since the people I have met who have produced measureable success make no money at it, don't care if people believe in it, and don't publicize the ability, I find profit, zeal, or fame to be unlikely motivation for trickery.
I have the feeling that in Australia using a phone as a GPS is illegal And it seems to me that having the maps actually in the device is a requirement, Internet is not that omnipresent.
GPS and computer maps are still only "best effort" information, there was an article about both Google and Mapquest routing people down a flight of stairs, and Google in NJ had us following a road which ended at a cow pasture. The tech to match satellite photos to map data, as a sanity check, seems to have a way to go.
I'd also like to see optical media go away. Burns take too long, are too likely not to work on another drive or even the same drive, have one little bad spot that spoils everything, and drives go bad all the time. I'll take SSDs over DVD-RWs. Wish more Linux distros were set up for easy installation onto and from flash memory drives.
livecdtools will take bootable install media and put them on USB flash nicely. At least for the distributions I use.
At least not that my hardware, home improvement, or lighting store can find. What I need is a 1:1 replacement for common 40/60w bulbs, and all I find is incompatible odd shapes which are only "compatible" in base size. I have spent a great deal of time and money keeping the original 1880s Victorian fixtures going, and many have original shades which clip on the bulb itself.
"Looks sorta like a light bulb" doesn't cut it, I use CFL where I can, and halogen floodlights in some places, but most of my bulbs are regular incandescent. The new GE high efficiency, long life, incandescents may very well serve, they are close to CFL in performance.
Reports seem to indicate that the reason H1N1 is dangerous is that people who are young adults are most likely to get really sick, because their immune systems react too strongly to the flu. Not unlike histamine reactions, it's a case of too much of a good thing.
The premise of using death rate as a metric is where I find the flaw, a vaccine is intended to prevent the disease, and that should be measurable by checking the verified infection rates in vaccinated and non-vaccinated populations with similar health, income, and exposure factors. The cost of having a worker or caregiver home sick would justify the cost of prevention in most cases. Add the cost saving of reduced spread rates for the infection and you don't need to argue mortality rates to justify a vaccination policy.
However most UNIX-like OS support connection binding. You can do this with Linux or BSD for sure, the problem is that the binding needs to be in place on both ends, you can't have a fast transfer rate to an arbitrary non-participating site. I used to have an ISP who let me bind multiple dial-up connections to his DSLAM, which did give fast connection to the outside world, but it wasn't a telco ISP. I could do it in the hours when he always had many unused ports, like 1am-6am, etc. But it still took two cooperating end points, it was just that one was a DSLAM.
You seem to have gotten other useful information, and you can also do it through multiple vpn connections, although I know of no remotely automated way to do it, I used to make the two connections and then run a script, aggregating a DSL and cable connection.
My feeling is that it's enough trouble do be of limited value, but it can be done, which was your original question.
This table of shell datashows some of the previous technology. I'm not convinced that by the time you build this, with a final stage rocket and guidance system, that it will be quite as cheap as implied. And the final stage needs to be really reliable, other nations would get upset if the payload didn't make it to orbit and big chunks of rocket fuel started coming down on them. And if the final stage doesn't work right, the [DESTRUCT] option might not, either.
My personal favorite is rail car to SCRAMJET ignition speed, airplane tech to get up to 50-70k ft and then one rocket stage to go to LEO. You don't need to lift the oxidizer (using air), you use aerodynamic lift initially, with a high lift to thrust efficiency, and the g-forces could be kept lower than any short duration impulse (gun) launcher.
I think we're closer to having the technology, too.
The FCC allows transmitters below a certain power level, and transmissions on certain very high frequencies without license. There is a PDF doc on that, and a discussion on the ARLL site which shed light on this.
Not all transmitters need be licensed, not even all operated, although if they are commercial products they must be registered. That's why some devices have the legend This product does not emit any RF at power levels or frequencies regulated by the FCC instead of an FCC number.
There's a ton of detail at those two links which clarify that there are some unregulated areas, although they are not where you would use them for blocking cell phones.
It seems that Mr Lynch wants to redefine bandwidth from the current meaning Verizon uses to charge more for faster connections (ie. transfer rate), to meaning usage (bytes transferred), for which they would also like to charge. In fact, it seems that all of the "providers" want to be paid for existing, and then overcharge for anyone who want to actually use their connection.
This is the same Verizon which first dropped all binary groups from their usenet offering, because about 1% of the groups might have contained porn, then dropped the groups completely. In both cases they said that their TOS allowed them to drop any service without lowering price or considering that a a breach of contract. They have terms of service which don't actually require them to provide anything, other than a monthly bill. This is Verizon which now blocks access to non-Verizon eMail providers unless they use a Verizon approved protocol instead of the standard POP3/SMTP protocols.
When I was in server support for Prodigy/SBC we simply whitelisted people for port 25 (SMTP) at the POP, Verizon doesn't seem to care, they explicitly have "no exceptions." Or for $300/mo you can get a real connection to the Internet from them
When I first saw the "rings" in the original 386 CPU, I thought MULTICS. I was around then, it was developed on a GE-645 computer, and I used PL/1 for a while (and would love subset G for Linux). Didn't know it was open sourced, maybe someone would start a project to get it on available hardware.
I heard from Steve Hobbs years ago that someone was trying to get an emulator for for the GE-235/265 going, so it could run DTSS, the first widely available commercial time sharing.
If someone is doing this I'd like to know, I certainly would like to help, even if it was done with a GE-645 hardware emulator it would be interesting. The emulator would be more fun, since it could run DTSS-II, GECOME, GTSS, etc, etc. That was all 36 bit hardware, of course, so it would benefit from some 64 bit hardware to make it usefully fast.
These kids will be "lucky" if this only sets back their educational growth by the length of the program, rather than messing up their whole expectation of education and fun. I fear someone has taken the idea of self directed learning, and instead of allowing students to choose their own path through the required facts and methods, with provision of some optional material, the idea of "fun" has crept in, and unfortunately this leads the students to conclude that when it ceases to be fun they can stop doing it.
Self directed learning can greatly speed education, particularly for smart students who read well, some of my offspring have benefited from it. But it isn't made fun so much as made interesting, which is quite another characteristic.
There are people who have never had a good idea in their lives, but love paperwork, chasing financing, licensing, marketing, filing reports with the various governments... find one (with some track record of success, please), even marry one (I did), but do not under any pressure try to do it yourself. You will not only be bad at it, you will hate, despise, abhor, it.
You have an idea and a patent, get a business person to take it from here. The lowest hassle path is licensing, let someone else figure out how to use, make, and market you gadget. And often surprise, someone else will find a use you never dreamed of, and pay you money with little effort on your part.
The secret of life seems to be to find a way to make enough money to be comfortable while doing something fun. And unless your idea of fun is constant non-creative wading through the swamps of paperwork and regulations business has become, let someone else do the nasty part. And by licensing you get a very high $/pain ratio. You also have time to work on the next big idea, instead of going to meeting.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
Although I carry a camera with me virtually everywhere I go, I rarely get a picture of any transient phenomena lasting less than six seconds. Unless you have the camera ready to go it's unlikely that you will get a picture, particularly a clear and unambiguous picture, of anything lasting only a few seconds, due to your reaction and camera startup time. Add to that the phenomena being rare, and often in conjunction with a lightning strike, and it's not surprising that there isn't much in the way of images, and what exists is subject to interpretation.
Anyone who has been really close to a lightning strike knows that you probably spend a few seconds on "That was close!" (or "Holy shit!"), followed a quick inventory of functional body parts with particular attention to bladder control. Then anything you have seen in those seconds gets processed for action.
When I was at GE Corp R&D, the names of the day were New York waterways. Thus the large fileservers were Hudson and Mohawk, smaller systems were Alplaus, Esopus, etc.
Individual groups used their own themes, such as fish, large (Whale), desktop (trout, halibut), and network connected devices (chum). After installing a group of servers for one particularly unpleasant manager, and being told that "naming is your job, not mine," I used the body fluids theme, and called them mucus, snot, vomit, and drool.
The software is deterministic. Therefore it is not the software which creates the output, but the user, the questioner. Ask the same question, get the same answer. The software is a tool, much as the brush for a painter, or the chisel for a sculptor. Control over the output is in the hands of the question, and therefore the creator is, and should be, the author.
I can't see this claim standing up to even a moderately well-financed challenge.
Where is the problem with exclusivity? And where is it written that a service must be sold with the price set to the cost?
Exclusivity is a valid and widely used tool for marketing. Supermarkets have "house brands," stores like WalMart and Radio Shack have their own brands, why is it worse in some way to have an item, say the iPhone, available from only one carrier? If you want the phone you go to the carrier. And if iPhone were available on all carriers the Android phones wouldn't have taken off as fast, and now the consumer has two smart phone operating systems to choose, and one is on hardware from many vendors.
Text pricing seems to be another competitive area, some vendors charge by the message, some have a bundle, some like Boost include unlimited text, etc. And dare I say it, as the price goes up people use it less and the market adjusts the price, like gasoline, caviar, or any other item. Text cost will follow the same curve as long distance, unlimited will be a selling point and the price will fall. Without the need for yet more complex laws.
It's all about choice, and cost, and there's plenty of room to make a choice of phone, carrier, and plan, without having the government decide what we are ofrfered and setting the price.
I have been using a combination of verified writes and dvdisaster to hold my important data. And for CDs they can not only be verified, but checked with C2 scans to see if the "correct" readback requires ECC at the sector level, or if the initial burn is successful.
Your irreplaceable pool is larger than mine, my really critical stuff fits on a pair of DL DVDs, so only about 14GB (I use "dvdisaster" software ECC in the images). However, I did spring for a Blu-Ray burner, which hasn't gone production yet but promises 20GB+ECC now, and possibly double that when/if 50GB media is available and affordable.
I have one more layer you don't, I inherited a large gun safe, and I have DVD backups in a small fireproof security box in that. That gives me hours of fire protection, and the data is in the format of encrypted ext2 filesystems, copies of loop mounted backup images.
The nice thing about DVDs is that they can be mailed to a secure location without needing a fast network connection.
I wonder if a standard UPS is enough isolation to mask the signal? I guess there are two types, the cheap ones which kick in when power fails, and the double conversion style, like Exide, which always convert AC to DC, then convert the DC back to AC. That let's them just add a little power during a brownout.
For all I know all of the major brands might be double conversion, but the Exide is the only one I've used which doesn't go to all battery power on low voltage.
He didn't say anything about RAID-0, he explicitly said "mirror" which is RAID-1. And the reliability of N drives becomes 1-(1-r)^N, or in layman's terms the probability of both drives failing at once. If I use your 95% figure, then reliability is 1-.05^2, or .9975. Since the probability of the software or the power supply failing is higher than that, not to worry.
The real point is that backups are to protect the data, RAID is to keep the system up if the hardware fails. In this case I think all the people who said get a backup instead are just right.
Given that there are scripts, at least in the free software world, which do this with major sites, it's not clear what you have in mind here. Video from most popular sites can be downloaded and saved, even transformed to other formats. But there is little need to do so, since the content remains online (usually).
None of this prevents use of DRM formats as well, although I doubt someone who wants their content to spread would use them. There's lots of room for everything to coexist.