They will suddenly have to maintain all of T-Mobile's hardware, but it won't do them that much good. AT&T's 3G and T-Mobile's 3G use different bands, and the vast majority of phones don't have the hardware to support both. At best, they could offload a little bit of 2G voice and EDGE traffic.
Yes, for data. Last I heard, at least for now, Verizon is not planning to adopt VoLTE, and AT&T isn't planning on starting to roll it out until 2013. And even if Europe and the U.S. all move to LTE with VoLTE support, it will be about a decade before there's a high enough tower concentration to use it without the need to fall back to GSM or CDMA.
Except that it is. If you actually care about having a phone that works outside the U.S., your choices are... AT&T or...
Oops. There's no second choice!
Yup. Unless you pay out the nose for an expensive "world phone", your options are basically AT&T or T-Mobile, and with T-Mobile gone, AT&T will be the only remaining GSM carrier in the United States.
I've done my part by writing a letter of complaint. Now go do yours.
No, RISC was an attempt to design a minimal instruction set under the assumption that a smaller instruction set leads to smaller CPUs that can be pipelined more efficiently.
This is going at it from the other side—taking an existing instruction set and determining which instructions are least frequently used and can be microcoded or software-emulated to allow for smaller chip design.
The subtle difference is that this isn't changing the ISA. It is just doing a time-space tradeoff on instructions (hardware vs. microcode or trap-based software emulation.
And no, before you say it, a firmware update is not "hacking the device" by any stretch of the imagination.
Yes, it is. The manufacturer didn't design those routers with the intent that people would run their own applications on them. Sure, they might have been kind to homebrew hackers and added a little more RAM and flash than their firmware required in certain models, but clearly the assumption for these devices is that the firmware upgrade mechanism will be used for running prepackaged, manufacturer-provided software kits without modification or addition, not a completely separate OS with a whole new pile of software.
I said hacking, not cracking, just to be clear. You know, as in "exceptionally clever programming"—the sort of clever work that involves soldering JTAG pins onto the board and attaching a debugger to repair things after accidentally bricking the device because it wasn't designed for users to add arbitrary software to it....
That's decidedly different from, for example, a computer based on Windows or Mac OS X, in which the average user is expected to go out and download software to add functionality. From a system design perspective, one is general purpose, the other was designed for a single, specific task.
Depending on how you define I/O, they either do or do not pass that. I would argue that the original intent of the term was to refer to devices that provide input and output directly to the user, e.g. a keyboard and screen, in which case they don't.
Either way, the original intent of the term was to explain the difference between parts that were designed to be used for a single purpose via parts that were designed to be programmed for arbitrary computation. That distinction, thanks to economies of scale on standard CPUs, has shifted from the CPU level to the whole-system level. The term needs to evolve similarly, for as originally defined, it is a useless distinction; all devices with any sort of processing ability built in the last two decades or so qualify, including the 8-bit CPUs in my microwave oven and my clock radio. Clearly, this was not the intent when the term was coined, as neither qualifies as general purpose by any rational definition.
Also, the term as originally defined is a really poor piece of terminology because it does not describe a computer, but rather, a CPU/processor, which is something that the rest of the planet has not called a computer... well, ever.... Thus, I think that term should be renamed to "general purpose processor".
Your problem is that you are defining a "computer" by the software that it comes with -- from the factory.
No, I'm defining it based on the hardware's intended purpose. A router was designed to move bits around from one network to another. It was built with the absolute minimum amount of hardware needed to do a single, specific task.
By contrast, a traditional computer that happens to have two NICs was designed for general computing use, and is being used for a more limited task. There's a fairly fundamental difference between the two.
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that 99.9% of people use hardware for the purpose it was designed for.
And you've hacked the router to do all of this. That's not the way a router was intended to be used. By that same definition, my laptop is a dinner plate, and a few of my old LEDs are firecrackers.
The purpose of laws against cracking computers is to prevent data and/or identity theft. To the extent that your router contains enough data to steal... maybe... but that's *really* a stretch.
Besides, nobody is talking about cracking into the device itself anyway, but rather cracking access keys to gain access to the network. I'm sure even you would agree that doing so does not constitute accessing a computer.
By computer, I'm using the term to mean "general purpose computer", which is how the term has been used by the vast majority of the public for at least a couple of decades. By loose enough definitions, my wristwatch is a computer. That doesn't mean it is what people intended to protect when they wrote laws protecting against computer break-ins.
An Internet kiosk either can meet those definitions but has been specifically limited by the owner (a user) by installing software so that other users cannot do those things or it cannot, in which case it is not a computer. It's not my definition of computer that's wrong here, but your definition of user. Any administrator is also a user.
And my definition works just fine for mainframes and servers, too, for the same reason. The sysadmin can install apps (and in many cases, all users can compile and install apps, though again, that's a site-specific policy), you can browse the web (even servers typically have lynx, and even CICS can telnet to port 80...), and you can write a term paper on them.
Embedded electronics in your car, however, are not computers in any meaningful sense of the word. They are embedded devices. Industrial controllers are certainly not general purpose computers, either. That said, breaking into an industrial controller should fall under other laws, like any other form of sabotage of industrial equipment. That should have significantly steeper penalties than breaking into a general purpose computer, and there's no reason for the same set of laws to cover both.
Just to clarify, cracking access to the disk should be criminal trespass in that you are accessing a resource (disk) that is effectively a part of my computer even though it happens to be physically attached using the network.
Seriously? Five minutes between posts for logged in users? What's wrong with this site? That's okay. I'll just click every second until it lets me post.
However, it still isn't a computer. Embedded devices might be functionally capable of doing many of the same things, but what distinguishes a computer is whether it provides the ability to install and run arbitrary software (not just whatever the manufacturer installed) that allows the user to create and store significant amounts of information without hacking the device in any way.
In layman's terms, the question can generally be worded as, "Can I install apps on it, write a term paper with it, then use it to browse the web." If the answer is, "yes," it's a computer.
As long as sites voluntarily choose to segregate themselves, I doubt that any forcing will occur. To that end, it's in the best interest of the 'net for sites to be self-policing. When the 'net isn't, then government tends to step in and make a mess of things.
No, the mistake was releasing the whole thing for free. If an artist wants to market a new CD, he or she gives away one or two tracks for free, not the entire CD.
Similarly, if an author wants to market a book, he or she should give away the first couple of chapters, ending with a teaser that says, "You'll be able to buy the entire book at Amazon.com on [insert date here]."
After the release, the author should then sell both paper and electronic copies for normal book prices.
Even while the porn sites most likely won't move from.com or.net
I wouldn't be so sure. The porn sites, from what I've heard, want to be in a.xxx domain so that they can be blocked more easily. Why? Because that gives them protection against future bills like COPA that would be much more burdensome for them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure a lot of porn sites will continue to maintain their.com or.net domains, but I'd imagine they will quickly be modified so that each page redirects you to the same page in the.xxx domain. It's easy enough to set up a web server to do that.
And many of the kids will have smart phones that can do it without a laptop. The comment in the article that "We do have wireless internet but we do not have enough bandwidth to support everyone using a laptop" doesn't make much sense. If you have a Wi-Fi access point in the room—even an old one—then you have a minimum of 11 Mbps shared. That's plenty of bandwidth for everyone to vote using a laptop.
Just grab a Wi-Fi hotspot, don't connect it to the "real" Internet, set it up to provide DHCP from a pool, and hook up the vote counting server to its wired connection. Or, for that matter, if you have 802.11g or faster, go ahead and connect it to the real Internet. Your upstream won't be that fast anyway, and you'll be connecting to a local machine, so you're basically guaranteed enough bandwidth to that machine no matter what other people are doing on the network, almost without exception.
Admittedly, there's also the problem that some consumer Wi-Fi access points use crappy CPUs that just plain can't handle 400 clients doing much of anything. If you run into that problem, buy yourself a Cisco wireless router (NOT Linksys-by-Cisco), and that problem should go away. Either way, that's a one-time expense for hardware that can be used for other things when you're not using it for that.
Now if the issue is that not everybody has a laptop or a smart phone in their possession, that's a different issue, but bandwidth shouldn't be a problem.
I would think that NetShare and other SOCKS-based proxies aren't detectable with that method because AFAIK TTL negotiation isn't part of the SOCKS protocol. Maybe those guys had the right idea.
Chernobyl did not have a containment vessel to catch and contain a melted core.... it melted out the bottom of the reactor and through the floor.
Doesn't matter. Chernobyl got hot enough to melt both steel and concrete. At its hottest point, Chernobyl reached 2255 Celsius, and was still at 1600 C after four days. Containment vessels are designed to capture a momentary catastrophic explosion, not to handle a Chernobyl-style meltdown in which uncontrolled fission occurs on a continuous basis over a protracted period of time.
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They will be probably be required to do so until the end of everyone's contract period. There's some debate beyond that.
Phones have antennas that are tuned to specific frequency ranges. It's not as easy as a firmware flash.
Corporations aren't evil. They're amoral. There's a subtle difference.
They will suddenly have to maintain all of T-Mobile's hardware, but it won't do them that much good. AT&T's 3G and T-Mobile's 3G use different bands, and the vast majority of phones don't have the hardware to support both. At best, they could offload a little bit of 2G voice and EDGE traffic.
It's ultimately not the FCC, but rather, the DOJ that would have to step in and stop it. So write them.
Yes, for data. Last I heard, at least for now, Verizon is not planning to adopt VoLTE, and AT&T isn't planning on starting to roll it out until 2013. And even if Europe and the U.S. all move to LTE with VoLTE support, it will be about a decade before there's a high enough tower concentration to use it without the need to fall back to GSM or CDMA.
Except that it is. If you actually care about having a phone that works outside the U.S., your choices are... AT&T or...
Oops. There's no second choice!
Yup. Unless you pay out the nose for an expensive "world phone", your options are basically AT&T or T-Mobile, and with T-Mobile gone, AT&T will be the only remaining GSM carrier in the United States.
I've done my part by writing a letter of complaint. Now go do yours.
http://www.justice.gov/atr/contact/newcase.html
It was annoying at two. Now, it's just obnoxious.
Which cause floating cities and flying cars. There you go.
No, RISC was an attempt to design a minimal instruction set under the assumption that a smaller instruction set leads to smaller CPUs that can be pipelined more efficiently.
This is going at it from the other side—taking an existing instruction set and determining which instructions are least frequently used and can be microcoded or software-emulated to allow for smaller chip design.
The subtle difference is that this isn't changing the ISA. It is just doing a time-space tradeoff on instructions (hardware vs. microcode or trap-based software emulation.
Yes, it is. The manufacturer didn't design those routers with the intent that people would run their own applications on them. Sure, they might have been kind to homebrew hackers and added a little more RAM and flash than their firmware required in certain models, but clearly the assumption for these devices is that the firmware upgrade mechanism will be used for running prepackaged, manufacturer-provided software kits without modification or addition, not a completely separate OS with a whole new pile of software.
I said hacking, not cracking, just to be clear. You know, as in "exceptionally clever programming"—the sort of clever work that involves soldering JTAG pins onto the board and attaching a debugger to repair things after accidentally bricking the device because it wasn't designed for users to add arbitrary software to it....
That's decidedly different from, for example, a computer based on Windows or Mac OS X, in which the average user is expected to go out and download software to add functionality. From a system design perspective, one is general purpose, the other was designed for a single, specific task.
Depending on how you define I/O, they either do or do not pass that. I would argue that the original intent of the term was to refer to devices that provide input and output directly to the user, e.g. a keyboard and screen, in which case they don't.
Either way, the original intent of the term was to explain the difference between parts that were designed to be used for a single purpose via parts that were designed to be programmed for arbitrary computation. That distinction, thanks to economies of scale on standard CPUs, has shifted from the CPU level to the whole-system level. The term needs to evolve similarly, for as originally defined, it is a useless distinction; all devices with any sort of processing ability built in the last two decades or so qualify, including the 8-bit CPUs in my microwave oven and my clock radio. Clearly, this was not the intent when the term was coined, as neither qualifies as general purpose by any rational definition.
Also, the term as originally defined is a really poor piece of terminology because it does not describe a computer, but rather, a CPU/processor, which is something that the rest of the planet has not called a computer... well, ever.... Thus, I think that term should be renamed to "general purpose processor".
No, I'm defining it based on the hardware's intended purpose. A router was designed to move bits around from one network to another. It was built with the absolute minimum amount of hardware needed to do a single, specific task.
By contrast, a traditional computer that happens to have two NICs was designed for general computing use, and is being used for a more limited task. There's a fairly fundamental difference between the two.
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that 99.9% of people use hardware for the purpose it was designed for.
And you've hacked the router to do all of this. That's not the way a router was intended to be used. By that same definition, my laptop is a dinner plate, and a few of my old LEDs are firecrackers.
The purpose of laws against cracking computers is to prevent data and/or identity theft. To the extent that your router contains enough data to steal... maybe... but that's *really* a stretch.
Besides, nobody is talking about cracking into the device itself anyway, but rather cracking access keys to gain access to the network. I'm sure even you would agree that doing so does not constitute accessing a computer.
By computer, I'm using the term to mean "general purpose computer", which is how the term has been used by the vast majority of the public for at least a couple of decades. By loose enough definitions, my wristwatch is a computer. That doesn't mean it is what people intended to protect when they wrote laws protecting against computer break-ins.
An Internet kiosk either can meet those definitions but has been specifically limited by the owner (a user) by installing software so that other users cannot do those things or it cannot, in which case it is not a computer. It's not my definition of computer that's wrong here, but your definition of user. Any administrator is also a user.
And my definition works just fine for mainframes and servers, too, for the same reason. The sysadmin can install apps (and in many cases, all users can compile and install apps, though again, that's a site-specific policy), you can browse the web (even servers typically have lynx, and even CICS can telnet to port 80...), and you can write a term paper on them.
Embedded electronics in your car, however, are not computers in any meaningful sense of the word. They are embedded devices. Industrial controllers are certainly not general purpose computers, either. That said, breaking into an industrial controller should fall under other laws, like any other form of sabotage of industrial equipment. That should have significantly steeper penalties than breaking into a general purpose computer, and there's no reason for the same set of laws to cover both.
Just to clarify, cracking access to the disk should be criminal trespass in that you are accessing a resource (disk) that is effectively a part of my computer even though it happens to be physically attached using the network.
Seriously? Five minutes between posts for logged in users? What's wrong with this site? That's okay. I'll just click every second until it lets me post.
would beg to differ.
However, it still isn't a computer. Embedded devices might be functionally capable of doing many of the same things, but what distinguishes a computer is whether it provides the ability to install and run arbitrary software (not just whatever the manufacturer installed) that allows the user to create and store significant amounts of information without hacking the device in any way.
In layman's terms, the question can generally be worded as, "Can I install apps on it, write a term paper with it, then use it to browse the web." If the answer is, "yes," it's a computer.
As long as sites voluntarily choose to segregate themselves, I doubt that any forcing will occur. To that end, it's in the best interest of the 'net for sites to be self-policing. When the 'net isn't, then government tends to step in and make a mess of things.
No, the mistake was releasing the whole thing for free. If an artist wants to market a new CD, he or she gives away one or two tracks for free, not the entire CD.
Similarly, if an author wants to market a book, he or she should give away the first couple of chapters, ending with a teaser that says, "You'll be able to buy the entire book at Amazon.com on [insert date here]."
After the release, the author should then sell both paper and electronic copies for normal book prices.
I wouldn't be so sure. The porn sites, from what I've heard, want to be in a .xxx domain so that they can be blocked more easily. Why? Because that gives them protection against future bills like COPA that would be much more burdensome for them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure a lot of porn sites will continue to maintain their .com or .net domains, but I'd imagine they will quickly be modified so that each page redirects you to the same page in the .xxx domain. It's easy enough to set up a web server to do that.
And many of the kids will have smart phones that can do it without a laptop. The comment in the article that "We do have wireless internet but we do not have enough bandwidth to support everyone using a laptop" doesn't make much sense. If you have a Wi-Fi access point in the room—even an old one—then you have a minimum of 11 Mbps shared. That's plenty of bandwidth for everyone to vote using a laptop.
Just grab a Wi-Fi hotspot, don't connect it to the "real" Internet, set it up to provide DHCP from a pool, and hook up the vote counting server to its wired connection. Or, for that matter, if you have 802.11g or faster, go ahead and connect it to the real Internet. Your upstream won't be that fast anyway, and you'll be connecting to a local machine, so you're basically guaranteed enough bandwidth to that machine no matter what other people are doing on the network, almost without exception.
Admittedly, there's also the problem that some consumer Wi-Fi access points use crappy CPUs that just plain can't handle 400 clients doing much of anything. If you run into that problem, buy yourself a Cisco wireless router (NOT Linksys-by-Cisco), and that problem should go away. Either way, that's a one-time expense for hardware that can be used for other things when you're not using it for that.
Now if the issue is that not everybody has a laptop or a smart phone in their possession, that's a different issue, but bandwidth shouldn't be a problem.
I would think that NetShare and other SOCKS-based proxies aren't detectable with that method because AFAIK TTL negotiation isn't part of the SOCKS protocol. Maybe those guys had the right idea.
Or a SOCKS proxy, depending on which tethering app we're talking about.
For sure, my druid?
Doesn't matter. Chernobyl got hot enough to melt both steel and concrete. At its hottest point, Chernobyl reached 2255 Celsius, and was still at 1600 C after four days. Containment vessels are designed to capture a momentary catastrophic explosion, not to handle a Chernobyl-style meltdown in which uncontrolled fission occurs on a continuous basis over a protracted period of time.