God I wish I had mod points right now! The only thing I think you left out is: If the guy has so much "down time", why did he waste his personal time writing this software? Why not do it in all his copious down time and thus get paid for writing it?
In addition to my own (There isn't much demand for it) I think we've seen a variety of answers to that in other posts.
Those aren't on cell networks because they aren't phones.
The question is "Why haven't *they* put BASIC on the phone?".
The answer, of course, is simple:
1. There isn't much demand for it.
2. It would open up their platform and their cell network to a barrage of crappy software.
Not to mention the fact that Libya only produces about 2 million barrels of oil per day (http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4513). Figure they export at most 1.5 million of it, that's not a lot to spread around. Hardly worth invading them for it. I'll stick with the "human rights" excuse too.
Agreed. The article seemed to be describing old hackers, hardly the methodical, *sudo using* people with the talent to be actual admins. Granted, there's a lot of overlap, but they are far from the same thing.
You're wrong, the parent is right.
FIAT currency tends to be *backed* by something, like an economy, like USA or European Union or even China. What is this backed by?
Anyway, another fad "currency". Might as well collect "ISK in eveonline" or "gold nuggets in WoW" - same thing.
You've got it completely backwards. Fiat currency is called fiat currency specifically because it *is not* backed by anything. It has value for no reason other then because someone (in this case a government) says so. But you are right about BitCoin, it is not backed by anything. BitCoin therefore, like the USD, is also a fiat currency, as it does not represent any actual value beyond that determined by the issuing agency or the merchants accepting it.
I believe that in this context the group of people who are advocating for things like civilian run mesh networks are not advocating that we *replace* the Internet as we know it today with these networks as so man Slashdotters seem to be assuming. They are not talking about having these systems in place for watching movies on Netflix, or for telling all your friends on facebook that you just farted.
Rather, the point is so that in a state of emergency (i.e., the government has completely lost it's marbles and decided to declare martial law and thereby shutdown all civilian communications) these networks can be used to continue to take advantage of the kind of instant mass communications our society has come to rely on. The point is so that you can still contact your family back on the other coast, or tell your friends you're hosting a meeting to talk about how to handle the national guard unit stationed around your neighborhood for your own "safety",
I think really, they just want to be able to send e-mail, and post in online forums.
Personally, I think it's too late. If, for example, the US federal government decides to "go Egypt on our asses", they're going to do it in the next few years, well before we have time to setup any sophisticated civilian run mesh networking. Our only hope is to make sure that such a thing never happens by pressuring our politicians hard, and getting our friends to do the same...
I suspect that most of the Slashdoters who are hating on OnLive actually just hate this Perlman fellow, and have never actually tried OnLive.
I've had a (free) OnLive since the beta and while I wouldn't pay money for it, it's not hard to imagine that lots of people would. When it works (which is subject to the whims of your ISP) it works surprisingly well and you quickly forget that it's a highly compressed video stream running at (for me) about 4Mbps. For RTSs, RPGs, puzzle games and the like (i.e., a very significant portion of PC games) it's quite usable. I tried a few FPSs on it, and they also ran well, but obviously if you're training for a career in Korea you'll be purchasing a copy for play on your local machine.
I've seen posts claiming it costs more then just buying a good gaming machine. I'd like to see some evidence for that. At 10$/mo. it's only $120/yr. Even if you only replace your gaming rig every 5 (gasp!) years, that gives you a measly $600 gaming rig. I think typical mid-range rigs go for more like $1,000 at the very least.
One negative comment that I will add about OnLive: Whenever they think your bandwidth has dropped too low, they'll automatically pause your game and force you to stare at a 5 minute countdown timer until you get booted entirely. Sometimes you get the option to reconnect, sometimes you don't. It "claims" to be testing your bandwidth to determine whether or not to let you reconnect. I've done a little snooping and it often seems that it isn't sending any data at all. This is a minor issue though which could easily be fixed.
The interstate commerce clause is frequently misused - but telecom and the Internet seems to clearly be interstate commerce.
Telecommunications does not equal commerce. Nor does the Internet (a subset of telecommunications) equal commerce.
A new University of Georgia study has found that despite overwhelming military superiority, the world's most powerful nations failed to achieve their objectives in 39 percent of their military operations since World War II.
39% hardly equates to *most*.
That somebody will explain how our superiority in the highly competitive black-ops space-plane carrying mystery cargo arena will eventually be converted into a solution for the fact that we can't seem to fight a ground war against a 14th century tribal rabble armed with 1950's eastern bloc shit without getting our stuff blown up all the time...
You might find this surprising, but most military powers find it difficult to fight wars without getting their stuff blown up all the time. I think it has something to do with the presence of a "foe".
Tell that to the Conquistadors.
To do nothing is to be nothing.
