Software should be sold as a commodity not licensed.

If country A and country B both had furniture business, and exporter Z arbitrarily sold wood at twice the price to country A, in the medium term the price of wood in country A would approach the cost of country B's cheap wood plus trucking wood from B to A, no huge deal.

But if you licensed fine grain furniture grade oak by the individual plank and certain planks could only be used in certain countries... this is the software license problem...

The USD used to be worth a hell of a lot more than its worth now. Even compared to just recently. One of the many fun side effects of the collapse of empire.

About 10 years ago the conversion from USD to AUD was darn near 60 cents to the buck. So a "$600 USD" thing really should cost "$1000 AUD" because of currency conversion rates. Today the ratio is very near 1:1. But if you've trained the kangaroos or whatever to expect to pay darn near twice as much in AUD as USD, then why not keep doin it if they're dumb enough to keep paying it?

The government involvement is the .gov always gets worked up over black market currency transactions. You go ask them to explain, I donno. Something about pretending to be an unregulated currency exchange. Combined with some weird money laundering possibilities. Also one of many reasons a country crashes its currency (competitive devaluation, etc) is to increase exports. But if the disobedient companies refuse to recognize the new exchange rate, that kinda defeats the purpose, thus they get pissed off. Also there's a lot of game theory in international economics where all the big players (the nations) agree to keep all their minons in check, otherwise things don't go so smooth. So if we start a mini-trade war over crappy web dev software, the aussies might fight back by not selling us Crocodile Dundee sequel movies or WTF they sell us. Probably most (semi-valuable) rocks aka ores of some sort. We probably sell them as much horse piss beer as they sell us so that would break even and not matter too much. So... anyway...

The same thing has pretty much happened with the Canadians. A decade ago $1.40 CDN bought you a buck, now its darn near parity $1 for $1. In the olden days paperback books and magazines always had something like $4.99 USA $6.99 Canada printed in ink on the cover. Obviously that would be a tremendous ripoff now that $1 equals about $1.

LOL I think you're over analyzing this, just search and replace the word "zombie" with "illegal alien" in the quoted description and unfortunately that's a very accurate description of how they're treated here. Unfortunately 1) things won't improve for them until the supply runs low 2) Its still better than back home for their definition of back home.

Rather than invading Iran, the best thing that could happen to the USA (and, frankly, about 99.9% of the mexicans) would be invading Mexico and doing a little regime change.

At least WRT usenet, my ISPs From: lines were in this format:

From: blah@isp.com (My Real Legal Name Goes Here)

So, no, its my real name all the time. Not so much for fidonet, etc, of course.

Just for fun I googled and the oldest usenet post I can find (which is weird, I know there's older) is me joining a flamewar in the mid 90s about what numerous Z80 active low control signals do when the CPU is reset and my insisting that having physically done this stuff 15 years previous to the flamewar that the active low control lines drift high and the people who were wrong insisting the control sigs go hi-z aka high impedance / tristate. Almost two decades later and I still don't know WTF those guys were thinking... I was there, man, they don't do that, and no amount of experience or quoting data sheets or books would convince the wrong guys. In summary, we got trolled, I guess.

The irony is there have been so many Z80 clones and Z80 derivatives and Z80 cores inside non-z80 chips like Z80 based microcontrollers and stuff, such that yes on an original date coded 1977 (or whatever) genuine Z80 from Zilog inc I was certainly correct, but there probably does exist some weird thing out there that might tristate the control signal lines while hoping the designer installed sufficient pull up resistors.

police scanner. Autocorrect Fs me up more than it helps me.

... just turn on your polite scanner or marine radio to the NWS channels and listen next time there's a psuedo-emergency. They have about 100 times as many psuedo-emergencies as real ones so they'll be plenty to listen to. Its not that complicated.

Been there, done that, we already have a zillion more illegal aliens than we need here, thanks.

Before I get flamed, note that I don't think its right how they're treated, but I am (unfortunately) right about how they are treated, so keep that in mind while fanning the flames with the race card.

Oh spare me. Its about as complicated as an ancient FSK bell 103 modem, like a 300 baud modem. You want a complicated layer 1, try a 56K modem or heck even the PSK / QAM family would be more complicated.

As for your "tricky" layer 2 message format, again, unimpressed.

A really simple hack would be that they system is heavily overused. Every time one divorced parent is 5 minutes late at prisoner exchange time they call the SWAT team to embarrass and punish. Every time a snow flake falls they send a critical warning. Every time a drop of rain falls, a tornado watch alert is sent. Now yes I'm well aware that once in a while there is a REAL emergency. The point being that you don't need a full set of encoders and decoders, because there is not chronological component or hashing or salting or any crypto at all, a simple tape recorder is all thats needed for chaos.

I would not be surprised if "out there" on the net there's a sort-gray-hat ftp site full of wav files ready to play on a smart phone held up to a broadcast/remote broadcast/wireless microphone.

You don't need a EE degree to write your own SAME encoder, nor do you have to attack the geeks simply for being able to do it. All you need is to know how to use google and how to use wavplayer and/or whatever plays wav files on your smartphone, and ...

Given the incredible simplicity of the SAME protocol I'm surprised that to the best of my knowledge SAME filters are not common in broadcast engineering.
It seems a pretty trivial filter to add to existing phone patch gear, for example, which would utterly eliminate the chance of your hack above.

Are you seeing multiple 2 or so millisecond bursts of adjacent more or less roughly 1500 and roughly 2000 hz? If so, eat them and output zero to the transmitter stream. Something like a phone patch already has plenty of latency for the echo cans so its no big deal to add.

This is so blindingly obvious that you'd think all phone patch gear would have it, so no one talks about it or even puts it in brochures. Or, as usually happens with security epic fails, they don't, LOL.

Its a hell of a lot simpler just to get really close and use a "low" power omni. If "they've" got 1e4 times the power but you're 1e6 times closer, you do the math for who wins the FM capture effect battle. Rather like a cheap mp3 transmitter can override a 50 kilowatt broadcast transmitter, well, for 10 feet or so. You can imagine the range a 50 watt mobile has vs a 1000 watt NOAA/NWS transmitter. This is in the news fairly often. Most commonly someone transmits over the NOAA weather radio freqs this way using some old VHF-hiband mobiles (now there's a well thats running dry...) reprogrammed.

Anybody who's ever written a SAME code decoder for weather radios or a SDR, or ever seriously considered it anyway, would not be very challenged by writing a SAME code encoder, in fact probably had to write one first, to test their decoder.

I enjoy the comedic stories I read in the newspaper about this. Those are real hacks. Like announcing a blizzard in Florida in the summer, heat warning in the frozen north during the winter. If I were still an impulsive teen I'd probably be doing that kind of thing.

However, the people who transmit sorta-plausible stuff intended to scare people are just jackasses. There's a fox news "joke" in there somewhere, or maybe not really a joke.

TLDR of the whole topic: Can't prevent layer 8 malfunctions via any method at any lower level 1-7. There is NOTHING the techs can do if mgmt fails. No checkbox can save them, no silver bullet can save them...

sure they did, they just didn't have the budget.

The fiber my local powerco installed along the ROW for their SCADA didn't go in until decades after the blueboxers where having their way with Ma Bell.

Yeah but there's work conflicts and timezone issues. Some simple downloadable .avi files I can drop on my mythtv box would be ideal.

Whats the internet? They just listed some specific services. I'm on usenet going back to 1989, I believe. Certainly 1991 at worst. Anyone younger than 35 or so pretty much just said "usenet? whats that?"

Amusingly they didn't list what it takes to remove yourself from compuserve (I was on from 1981 till... donno) and prodigy and myspace and ...

30 years from now you'll mention you were on linkedin and the 22 year old girls in HR who filter the resumes will say, "huh? Whats a linkedin?" Ditto facebook, G+, etc.

A large part of the modern educational system is geared precisely toward that. We are easily the best prepared 1913 workforce the world has ever seen. Our 10000 man factories will be staffed by fully qualified drones, our draftsmen are fast and precise when hand drawing blueprints... The more you think about it, the truer it is. The bell rings, just like a factory whistle. Rows of desks just like rows of (hand/human operated) machines on the factory floor. Not much has changed in over a century.