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Comment Re:packet radio? (Score 1) 371

Maybe the problem then is that the business radio systems are (it would seem from the above) much more expensive than ham gear?

I haven't looked into pricing of business band radios, but it is fairly common for hams to get business radios and modify them for use on amateur bands. I suspect the difference would come out in licensing.

Comment Re:So.... (Score 1) 531

If something happens to your car while it is parked there, the fact that the owner of the garage has disclaimed responsibility does not mean you have not had your property damaged/stolen. If the police went through a garage searching people's vehicles without warrants on the basis that the people who parked the cars there no longer owned them, they'd get laughed out of court.
Security

Submission + - Security consultants warn about PROTECT-IP Act (nationaljournal.com)

epee1221 writes: Several security professionals released a paper (PDF) raising objections to the DNS filtering mandated by the proposed PROTECT-IP Act. The measure allows courts to require Internet service providers to redirect or block queries for a domain deemed to be infringing on IP laws. ISPs will not be able to improve DNS security using DNSSEC, a system for cryptographically signing DNS records to ensure their authenticity, as the sort of manipulation mandated by PROTECT-IP is the type of interference DNSSEC is meant to prevent. The paper notes that a DNS server which has been compromised by a cracker would be indistinguishable from one operating under a court order to alter its DNS responses. The measure also points to a possible fragmenting of the DNS system, effectively making domain names non-universal, and the DNS manipulation may lead to collateral damage (i.e. filtering an infringing domain may block access to non-infringing content). It is also pointed out that DNS filtering does not actually keep determined users from accessing content, as they can still access non-filtered DNS servers or directly enter the blocked site's IP address if it is known.

A statement by the MPAA disputes these claims, arguing that typical users lack the expertise to select a different DNS server and that the Internet must not be allowed to "decay into a lawless Wild West."

Paul Vixie, a coauthor of the paper, elaborates in his blog.

Comment Re:No snow days (Score 1) 223

I'm a few hours' drive north of 45 (at 47 or so). Local k12 schools call it a snow day when there's enough snowfall to make it unsafe to drive (for reference, people here are used to driving on snow-covered roads). The few times I've seen the university declare a snow day, visibility has been short enough that when I looked out my front window, I could not even see as far as the street. At some points visibility has been too short to even see my car in the driveway. There was also that one weekend when we were temporarily stuck in a town 100 miles away, as the antifreeze had frozen. Had this been during the week, I wouldn't be surprised to see schools close for the day.

Comment Re:Not a web dev specialist myself, but (Score 1) 831

Why are you only satisfied if the backend coder is explicitly creating/joining threads? You don't have to be the one deciding when threads get created in order to have them stepping on each others' toes.

Again, I'm not trying to be confrontational; just showing my web app ignorance. Or am I?

Consider slashdot. Look up at your URL bar. Notice that it looks you asked the server for a perl script (.pl), not an HTML file (.html). The server is configured to interpret that request as a request for the output given by that perl script (with the parameters given at the end of the URL). The perl script asks a database for some information on users, their comments, etc. so that it can construct an HTML page to send you. The backend coder in a web app writes HTML only in the sense that a compiler writer writes assembly. Slashdot is based on perl code that generates HTML code.

Comment Not a web dev specialist myself, but (Score 1) 831

A simple, static web site is just some HTML files that a server sends out when a browser requests them, but when you write a web app that generates pages dynamically, the HTML sent to the browser is just what a program run by the web server generates as output. This program is invoked when someone asks the server for a page. Since the program doesn't continue running after generating the page to be served, web apps typically use a database backend to maintain persistent state (who's logged in, what they've posted, what privileges they have, etc.). If you have a lot of users active at once, the web server will have a bunch of threads operating at once, so there's potential for serious race condition issues.

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