First thing to try is setting your AP to a different channel.

If that doesn't set you right, get a USB Wifi device that is supported under Linux and fire up Kismet and identify any strong signals nearby.

Back in the days of dial-up modems, Hayes tried to force Motorola to license the (pause)+++(pause) escape sequence [Heatherington].

The response was swift... Motorola looked in their own collection of patents to see what Hayes probably infringed....

To paraphrase, the response started with "You use wire, don't you?"

The ID cards are not the problem. The problem is consequences.

Today, it is cheaper to staff with undocumented workers and hope they don't get caught. If ALL employers had to verify the ID of all of their employees and contractors or face serious fines and all contractors (including household help) were required to show a verifiable ID and anyone who fails to check or falsifies faced serious penalties, this problem would be hugely reduced overnight.

The real problem is that the big businesses (agriculture, meat packing, hospitality, commercial real-estate, etc..) want the cheap labor and won't let the problem be solved.

Nobody ever thought to tell them they couldn't succeed at that.... so they just did it!

Bravo!

Well, it's nice to know that the city of Orange won't let residents save water while the rest of the towns on the same water system are offering bumper stickers that say "I killed my lawn.. ask me how"

The issue with this would impact someone who forms his own contracting firm and starts to deduct business expenses like getting from home to the job site, home office costs, etc... If he is later declared to be an employee, all those deductions get disallowed and he owes the back taxes. I suspect that, if he incorporated and paid himself mostly by distributions, he also paid his taxes at capital gains rates instead of the wage rates. That's a privilege restricted to lawyers, doctors, financial consultants, investment fund managers, and corporate officers.

Now, originally, the law's effect would have been balanced by the way that it kept companies like Microsoft and IBM from just making everyone a contractor to remove benefits, but the corporation quickly figured out that they could use temp agencies as a middle-man. It wasn't until a major lawsuit in the late 1990s that companies became sensitive to the idea that if it walks like a duck (employee) and quacks like a duck (employee), then it is a duck (employee) that can sue you for benefits. After that suit, many companies started brining contractors back on the payroll to avoid later class action claims.

The author and I were contemporaries and he forgot one very important reason he was never prosecuted. In 1974, there was no crime even if this had been done by an adult maliciously and for money. The pendulum, of course, has swung far in the other direction and users now face serious criminal charges for TOS violations.

By the way, many of us who have good heads for computer security learned during years before it became a felony to practice.

The problem with investing in green tech isn't the EPA. (Many of the worst chemicals in Solar Panel manufacturing are so toxic that they kill you instantly if you mishandle them... and they don't stick around).

The problem is that these investments take years to payoff and US corporations provide incentives for very short term results at the expense of serious long term investments.

If I have a small business in CA and sell less than $400/year retail, the state doesn't want to be bothered setting up to collect sales tax from me. Similarly, if I run a small candy store in Vermont and ship something to CA a few times a year, it isn't worth anyone's trouble to collect sales tax. That said, if I do sell within my state, I have to compete with businesses that pay no taxes.

Here's a reasonable solution....

1) If you ship less than $5K/year into a state and you aren't located there, don't worry about it.

2) If you ship more than $5K/year into a state, then you must check with that state (in a nationally standardized way) to find out if they have opted to tax incoming items. If they have, you have to pay the same tax rate as their in-state businesses, but you get to send it to the state along with a standardized (probably CSV) file indicating the zip-codes and totals you have shipped to.

3) If you ship from outside the US, you can either follow the procedure in (2) above, you can let ebay/paypal/Visa/MasterCard/Google handle that for you, or you can pay a standardized 10% fee by the same mechanisms that handle import duties now. Common Carriers (USPS, DHL, FedEx, UPS) would find it necessary to ensure that they either have confirmation that the duties have been paid or that they collect them from the shipper (just as they presumably do now if you try to ship something non-duty-free from abroad).

Its a shame that the article missed so much....

Like the times when much of the industry didn't want to license the Hetherington Patent from Hayes on the "guard time" surrounding the "+++" in the escape sequence, so Hayes ended all of their press releases with +++ATH0 (which would cause a lot of modems to hang up on the BBS systems of their day).

They also missed the interesting fact that the "56K" modem was an old idea that was rattling around Bellcore for years before 1996 and fairly common knowledge in the Bell system. [The big issue with getting there was the need to have digital trunks connecting all of the dial-in server pools with the telephone network.]

Probable never would have become a mainstream consumer device without AOL. Until AOL, you really had to be a geek to use one.

And, of course, the modem wars of 1996-1998, as the major technology companies duked it out, the vast majority of modem companies went bust, including Hayes.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/blackberry-outage-sweeps-north-america/article1409608/

A lot of applications really need to just send a few packets a month (alarms, metering, etc...) but all of the US wireless carriers insist on minimum charges of $30-$60/month for each distinct piece of hardware that sends data. Funny how the carriers don't care to meter usage in a downward direction.

http://opensource.palm.com/1.3.1/index.html seems to have the source and patches. Is this the end of it or is something missing?

Sounds like a great new UI feature from KDE. Microsoft better get working on their patent application.