Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:"Conservatives" hating neutrality baffles me (Score 1) 550

ok, I'll bite. I understand how the internet works as well as most people who don't spend most of their time writing RFCs (I owned an ISP back in the dial-up days and I've configured BGP as a network admin).

However, I also understand public choice economics and the fact that once the FCC begins to regulate the Internet (in the name of Net Neutrality), their incentives are driven by the politics of the commissioners (hence why this decision was 3 Dems vs. 2 Reps) and by the companies they regulate. It's nice when that sometimes coincides with the interests of the "regular guy", but it typically doesn't over time. Examples from history abound. See Baptists and Bootleggers.

I also understand that Comcast vs. Netflix was about contractual rights and was solved by the various parties making private agreements for bandwidth and transit usage, not by government regulation.

The supposed "reason" for the FCC regulations (prioritizing content providers by ISPs) isn't something that is actually happening in a widespread manner nor negatively affecting consumers, so why give a small government body control over the Internet so that they can over time regulate it pretty much however they want to.... and by want to, I mean how their political and embedded corporate interests want them to.

Comment Re:Zero Research (Score 1) 300

I'm happy to agree with you that Mozilla had every right to do what they did. Allowing people/companies, etc... make bad choices about what to do with their own resources is a valuable part of freedom. They just suffer the consequences if it was a bad choice.

Nothing you wrote disputes my point that when a company's values become more focused on A rather than B, when they used to be known for B, they will tend to drift off of success at B.

It applies to companies, people, countries, etc... they become successful because of a positive trait/action (like hard work, innovation, whatever) and then they become prideful and change their focus to something else and lose track of the values that got them there, then wonder why they start becoming less successful over time.

Someone's freedom doesn't extend to me being required to agree with them, just that I don't use force to stop them. Of course, many folks have lost sight of that, seeming to want to punish people for disagreeing with them on the latest controversial issue.

Comment Re: Many are leaving ham radio too (Score 1) 135

You have the Part 15 and ISM services for that. You really can buy a microwave link that's metropolitan-distance and legal to use.

We lost much of our 440 capability to PAVE PAWS in California. Remember, Amateur Radio is not the primary service on many bands. The military is on 440.

Comment Re:Many are leaving ham radio too (Score 1) 135

If you want that nearly infinite microwave spectrum, you have the Part 15 and ISM services. Absolutely nothing is stopping you. Power is not the issue with those frequencies, it's line of sight and Fresnel zones.

No, I absolutely do not have to prefix my words with anything. You do that by posting as an anonymous coward. I use my real name to indicate that I stand behind my words.

Comment Re:Zero Research (Score 4, Insightful) 300

At least they didn't talk about how Mozilla are leaders in the diversity movement and have pride in having a different standard.

I guess once you put politically correct groupthink over people with a proven track record of innovation, innovation starts to suffer and go away.

This process is also known a "Bad Luck". Sounds like Mozilla is suffering from bad luck...

Comment Oh Come On, it's a Press Release (Score 4, Insightful) 88

OK, no real technical data and some absurd claims here.

First all-digital transceiver? No. There have been others. Especially if you allow them to have a DAC and an ADC and no other components in the analog domain, but even without that, there are lots of IoT-class radios with direct-to-digital detectors and digital outputs directly to the antenna. You might have one in your car remote (mine is two-way).

And they have to use patented algorithms? Everybody else can get along with well-known technology old enough that any applicable patents are long expired.

It would be nicer if there was some information about what they are actually doing. If they really have patented it, there's no reason to hold back.

Comment Re:you can do osx and ios in c++ (Score 1) 407

Cfront worked by translating C++ into C, which was then run through a C compiler. As such, cfront had to be abandoned in the early 90s because there were certain syntactic structures that simply couldn't be expressed in a reasonable amount of C source code.

The original poster is (mostly) correct. Cfront was a compiler only in the sense that it did a transform of one language (C++) into another (C). It was not a compiler to any extent beyond that; compiling to native code was left up to the system C compiler.

Where the original poster is wrong is calling C++ a "preprocessor for C". That's a reasonably-correct way to describe one early implementation of a C++ compilation system, but it's not an accurate way to describe the language itself.

Comment Parody is protected (Score 3, Informative) 255

Parody is protected; satire is not. Parody uses the objects of an artistic creation to criticize, lampoon, or make fun of the original creation. Satire uses the objects of one artistic creation to criticize, lampoon, or make fun of other creations. Using A to mock A is fair game in copyright law. Using A to mock B is seen as a violation of the copyright holder of A's rights.

As an example: Demolition Man used commercial jingles and Taco Bell to satirize modern American life and where it was headed, but they weren't really holding up the Oscar-Meyer Company or Taco Bell up for ridicule. The laughs were aimed elsewhere. As a result, they had to get permission from the Oscar-Meyer company to use the Oscar-Meyer wiener jingle, and permission from Taco Bell to use the Taco Bell logo. That's satire.

The Power Rangers fan film is pretty much straight-up parody. They're not scoring points about anything outside the Power Rangers franchise: they're just holding it up for brutal mocking. That's parody, and that means the people who made it were A-OK.

Submission + - Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules (nytimes.com) 1

HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. “It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” says Jason R. Baron. A spokesman for Clinton defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Comment Re:Viewing Launches (Score 1) 23

With luck, they'll start incorporating our radio transceivers. I hear that SpaceX flies with several USRPs now, so that's not completely unrealistic. That might be as close as I can get. Anyone who can get me a base invitation, though, would be greatly appreciated and I'd be happy to do some entertaining speeches while there. I need a base invite for Vandenberg, too. I got in to the official viewing site for the first try of the last launch (and that scrubbed too), but this next one is on Pad 6.

Comment Viewing Launches (Score 3, Interesting) 23

I was in Florida to speak at Orlando Hamcation and went to see the DISCOVR launch at Kennedy Space Center. I paid $50 to be at LC-39 for the launch, an observation tower made from a disused gantry on the Nasa Causeway between the pads and the Vehicle Assembly Building. A crawler was parked next door! A hot sandwich buffet, chips, and sodas were served. It was cold and windy! I watched for a few hours and unfortunately the launch scrubbed due to high stratospheric winds.

The next day, Delaware North Corporation, which operates tourism at KSC, decided not to open LC-39 or the Saturn 5 center for the launch. This was the third launch attempt and I guess they decided most people had left. I was annoyed.

The closest beach was going to be closed in the evening, it's a sensitive ecological area. I ended up seeing the launch from Jetty Park. This turned out not to be such a great location, the tower wasn't visible at all and the first 10 seconds of the rocket in flight were obscured before we saw it over a hill.

What's a better viewing location?

Slashdot Top Deals

Physician: One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well. -- Ambrose Bierce

Working...