I dont understand why a college would require that. If someone is paying a fortune to attend college and wants to live in an off-campus apartment, why should the college care?
In some cases the college cares about the student attending classes because e.g. the parents are paying the tuition and care that they are getting their moneys worth but I see no reason why students cant still make it to class even if they are living in off-campus housing.
All of the Telstra infrastructure (including the HFC network and the copper network) is to be decommissioned as part of the NBN roll-out. So no, the government isn't taking a short cut here.
There IS a plan by the federal opposition to scrap the NBN and build a cheaper alternative using existing infrastructure (including both the Telstra and Optus HFC networks) but that wont happen unless the opposition wins the next election.
What the $11 billion being paid to Telstra by NBNco is buying is the abillity to put NBN gear in Telstra premises and NBN fiber in Telstra ducts and cable runs and stuff.
The fiber system is being paid for by the government, not Telstra. Every fiber box includes a battery-backed VoIP gateway device that you plug a PSTN phone into (either line powered or wall powered) and which sends phone signals over the fiber link back through the network to the "point of interconnect" where the ISPs all connect to the network.
At that point, the ISPs take the VoIP data and run it into some sort of carrier-level gear that talks whatever VoIP protocol the NBN is using.
That said, I can see why Telstra is doing this though, they dont want to have to maintain both copper PSTN gear AND NBN Fiber VoIP gear in a given area if they can avoid doing so and want to hold off buying and installing the Fiber gear for as long as possible (i.e. only doing it when they need to service an area with no copper or where the copper has been decommissioned)
Personally I would like to see other ISPs like Optus, iiNet and TPG run a marketing campaign specifically aimed at showing how they are just as good as Telstra without the huge price tag.
The only reason I have a land-line is because I have to have one to get ADSL. I haven't had a land-line phone hooked up in years and make all my calls on mobile phones.
In cases of power outages, if I do need to make a phone call for some reason (e.g. to the power company to check on the ETA for power coming back on) I use my mobile (and with one exception during a MASSIVE city-wide storm) I have never had the mobile towers go down even during blackouts.
And yes I am in Australia and want NBN when it hits my area and will be glad when I can say goodbye to Telstra forever.
The problem is that (last I checked) its not legal for for the cops to give you a caution and then later go back and issue a new punishment for the same crime.
Also, community service alone would probably not act as a deterrent to anyone thinking of going exploring in the abandoned parts of the Underground in the way that the threat of an ASBO like this would.
What they should do is to invest more money on security. All access to tunnels, track areas, unused stations and other off-limits areas should be blocked with gates, doors, bars, locks and grills. Access to the track via the platform edge should be blocked by doors (already in use at some stations) that only open when a train pulls up.
Keep these people from being able to trespass in the first place and there wont be any need to issue ASBOs.
You don't need that if the bot simply broadcasts any control message it receives to a known port on any computers it can find (without caring whether they are infected or not or whether the message got through). If enough machines are infected (and if the bot-net masters send the new message to enough initial known-infected hosts) then the message will be disbursed widely enough that most of the infected hosts will pick it up.
If they were smart, they would have used public key cryptography to ensure that only commands signed by the bot-net author will be accepted. Assuming the RSA key is strong enough, it would be impossible for anyone else to send commands short of an as-yet-unknown weakness in RSA or a bug in the bot-net code.
Doesn't mean all that much if the compiler vendors dont implement all these great features.
Visual C++ (the compiler I have to use for a certain project due to C++ ABI compatibility issues with existing code and a better compiler on Windows than GCC IMO) doesn't support any of the interesting stuff like "Delegating Constructors", "Inheriting Constructors", "Initializer Lists", "Range-based for-loop", "constexpr" and "Non-static data member initializers".
Even the next version is little better on supporting the nice bits of C++11:(
Instead Microsoft spent a lot of effort adding all kinds of useless new compiler crap to support their WinRT junk (which to me seems like the answer to a question nobody asked)
Texas becoming a no-fly zone would cripple the US because of the large number of flights that pass through massive hubs at Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport, George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston and other major hub airports.
There are only 2 things airport security should be preventing with regards to commercial airplanes, the first is anything that would allow someone unauthorized to take control over an airplane which has been done through reinforced cockpit doors. The second is anything that is capable of causing enough damage to an airplane that the airplane is unable to continue flying. Neither of these 2 things requires body scanners, liquid bans or pat downs to stop.
Some measures taken after 9/11 are GOOD including reinforced cockpit doors and the replacement of airport-employed/airline-employed security staff with (presumably) better trained federal employees.
But most of the measures including liquid restrictions, body scanners, pat-downs, increased screening of checked bags, special laptop checks, bans on printer cartridges, no-fly lists, checked-baggage x-rays etc are nothing but expensive unnecessary security theater.
Instead of cutting money from NASA, how about cutting all the spending on these stupid wasteful security measures that do nothing except annoy the flying public and make a lot of money for a few special interests (such as the companies that make all the expensive equipment now operating at airports)
I suspect the reason for the delay request is that some of the computers that remain infected are computers that are important, i.e. if those computers stopped working or stopped being able to connect to the internet, companies would loose money or worse.
If the US government took the money they are spending on unnecessary and unneeded military projects like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and on maintaining expensive-to-run military bases in places like Okinawa and spent it on things that benefit mankind instead, the world would be a far better place.
Google Transit is great plus Transperth publish their GTFS feed data. Only downside is that you cant use Google Transit on a Nokia N900 Linux phone (I keep meaning to write an app for it but I never got around to it and couldn't be bothered figuring out how to parse the GTFS feed properly)
The FCC has mandated that as of March 2007 all TVs sold in the US (along with all other devices that contain an analog TV tuner such as VCRs, DVD recorders and PVRs) must include an ATSC digital tuner. So yes you cant legally buy a TV set in the US right now without paying money to all the patent holders who hold patents on various parts of the ATSC standard (including those who hold patents on MPEG video and on Dolby AC3 audio)
So many government mandated standards require the use of patented technology. Every single digital TV standard worldwide requires licenses for a hundred or more patents just to build the receiver/decoder. Then you need licenses on top of that to actually decode the audio and video content.
Digital radio is just as bad requiring licenses for various flavors of MPEG audio.
Anyone wanting to set up a mobile phone network or build hardware for one (including handsets) is going to need to license 100s of patents even for the most basic GSM handset.
Wireless data standards like WiFi and WiMax are also heavily patented.
In many cases these patents (or patent pools) require the payment of per-unit royalties where it is impossible for any free-as-in-zero-cost program (be it Free Software, Open Source or otherwise) to ever get a license (I know of at least one game engine that uses a derivative of MPEG audio to store things like music and had to remove support for this from their mod SDK because its impossible to get a license for a MP3 encoder for a free-as-in-zero-cost program no matter how much you pay in license fees)
Along the same lines, it would be impossible to produce a free-as-in-zero-cost DVD player for Linux (closed or open source) because patents on essential components of the DVD standards like MPEG video require the payment of per-unit royalties.
For those who think VP8 and other "open" codecs are the solution, even Google wont be able to stand up to MPEGLA if the holders of the MPEG patents decide to take Google to court and claim that VP8 infringes their patents.
The only way this can change is to get politicians in Washington and Canberra and Brussels and Auckland and Tokyo and Berlin and London and elsewhere who will pass laws eliminating software patents. But that wont happen as long as big companies continue to hold political influence over the worlds governments.
You could always use an open source browser (Chromium, Firefox, whatever) and modify it to ignore the "do not automatically store data for this form" attribute in the HTML form tag. Or you could write a browser plugin or other tool that is designed to strip that attribute.
How do we convince people that no, the very small threat of terrorism (which is FAR less risky than the government and media make it out to be) is NOT justification for violating the civil liberties of ordinary citizens.
Or is the propaganda from the government and big media companies so effective that its impossible to counter it?
This would be like the cops shutting down an entire block of storage units because someone was storing illicit drugs in one of the units.
If this site was being used for phishing scams the right thing is to notify the owner of the site and ask them to remove the content in question (and to provide copies of that content to the appropriate law enforcement agency if necessary)
The real question is why any school continues to serve things like chicken nuggets (which are not exactly health food) and why school districts have resisted efforts to make school lunches healthier...
They should just make it illegal to use any machine that dials people and plays a recorded message. Anyone wants to reach you (including non-profit organizations, charities, survey organizations, political parties etc), they can employ a bunch of people to ring numbers manually (even if what came down the phone at the other end was a pre-recorded message, if they had to dial the number manually it would be enough to discourage this practice due to the cost of hiring staff to dial)
auto-dialers are one of those inventions the world would be better off without (like the technology Hollywood uses to turn 2D films into crappy-looking near-unwatchable 3D films)
AT&T needs to totally re-think the way they charge for services. Eliminate the need to buy a "data plan" to have a smartphone and just have people sign up to different plans.
Bring in new plans that are closer to what it actually costs to provide the services So a $20 per month plan could have 300 minutes of voice, 100 texts and 500mb of data. A $50 per moth plan could have 500 minutes of voice, 150 texts and 1GB of data. And so on with a top tier $100 per month plan having maybe 2000 minutes of voice, 500 texts and 4GB of data.
Any minutes, text or data you use above the plan is charged at the relevant per-minute, per-text or per-megabyte rate.
Oh and change the way charging and billing works so that people no longer have to pay for incoming calls and texts and make the originator of those calls and texts pay instead.
ok, so it not as bad as it sounds because you need to find a public key with P, Q or both matched to the key you want.
e.g. its not like someone is going to be able to take the signing key for the XBOX 360 game disks and magically crack that open unless somehow by magic someone posted another public key out there that has the same public key or Microsoft REALLY screwed up their cryptography.
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I dont understand why a college would require that.
If someone is paying a fortune to attend college and wants to live in an off-campus apartment, why should the college care?
In some cases the college cares about the student attending classes because e.g. the parents are paying the tuition and care that they are getting their moneys worth but I see no reason why students cant still make it to class even if they are living in off-campus housing.
All of the Telstra infrastructure (including the HFC network and the copper network) is to be decommissioned as part of the NBN roll-out. So no, the government isn't taking a short cut here.
There IS a plan by the federal opposition to scrap the NBN and build a cheaper alternative using existing infrastructure (including both the Telstra and Optus HFC networks) but that wont happen unless the opposition wins the next election.
What the $11 billion being paid to Telstra by NBNco is buying is the abillity to put NBN gear in Telstra premises and NBN fiber in Telstra ducts and cable runs and stuff.
The fiber system is being paid for by the government, not Telstra. Every fiber box includes a battery-backed VoIP gateway device that you plug a PSTN phone into (either line powered or wall powered) and which sends phone signals over the fiber link back through the network to the "point of interconnect" where the ISPs all connect to the network.
At that point, the ISPs take the VoIP data and run it into some sort of carrier-level gear that talks whatever VoIP protocol the NBN is using.
That said, I can see why Telstra is doing this though, they dont want to have to maintain both copper PSTN gear AND NBN Fiber VoIP gear in a given area if they can avoid doing so and want to hold off buying and installing the Fiber gear for as long as possible (i.e. only doing it when they need to service an area with no copper or where the copper has been decommissioned)
Personally I would like to see other ISPs like Optus, iiNet and TPG run a marketing campaign specifically aimed at showing how they are just as good as Telstra without the huge price tag.
The only reason I have a land-line is because I have to have one to get ADSL. I haven't had a land-line phone hooked up in years and make all my calls on mobile phones.
In cases of power outages, if I do need to make a phone call for some reason (e.g. to the power company to check on the ETA for power coming back on) I use my mobile (and with one exception during a MASSIVE city-wide storm) I have never had the mobile towers go down even during blackouts.
And yes I am in Australia and want NBN when it hits my area and will be glad when I can say goodbye to Telstra forever.
The problem is that (last I checked) its not legal for for the cops to give you a caution and then later go back and issue a new punishment for the same crime.
Also, community service alone would probably not act as a deterrent to anyone thinking of going exploring in the abandoned parts of the Underground in the way that the threat of an ASBO like this would.
What they should do is to invest more money on security. All access to tunnels, track areas, unused stations and other off-limits areas should be blocked with gates, doors, bars, locks and grills. Access to the track via the platform edge should be blocked by doors (already in use at some stations) that only open when a train pulls up.
Keep these people from being able to trespass in the first place and there wont be any need to issue ASBOs.
You don't need that if the bot simply broadcasts any control message it receives to a known port on any computers it can find (without caring whether they are infected or not or whether the message got through). If enough machines are infected (and if the bot-net masters send the new message to enough initial known-infected hosts) then the message will be disbursed widely enough that most of the infected hosts will pick it up.
If they were smart, they would have used public key cryptography to ensure that only commands signed by the bot-net author will be accepted. Assuming the RSA key is strong enough, it would be impossible for anyone else to send commands short of an as-yet-unknown weakness in RSA or a bug in the bot-net code.
Australia switched to plastic money years ago and its worked great for us. And I am sure its just as durable than US money if not more so.
Doesn't mean all that much if the compiler vendors dont implement all these great features.
Visual C++ (the compiler I have to use for a certain project due to C++ ABI compatibility issues with existing code and a better compiler on Windows than GCC IMO) doesn't support any of the interesting stuff like "Delegating Constructors", "Inheriting Constructors", "Initializer Lists", "Range-based for-loop", "constexpr" and "Non-static data member initializers".
Even the next version is little better on supporting the nice bits of C++11 :(
Instead Microsoft spent a lot of effort adding all kinds of useless new compiler crap to support their WinRT junk (which to me seems like the answer to a question nobody asked)
Texas becoming a no-fly zone would cripple the US because of the large number of flights that pass through massive hubs at Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport, George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston and other major hub airports.
John Travolta flies a 707, not a 737.
There are only 2 things airport security should be preventing with regards to commercial airplanes, the first is anything that would allow someone unauthorized to take control over an airplane which has been done through reinforced cockpit doors. The second is anything that is capable of causing enough damage to an airplane that the airplane is unable to continue flying. Neither of these 2 things requires body scanners, liquid bans or pat downs to stop.
Some measures taken after 9/11 are GOOD including reinforced cockpit doors and the replacement of airport-employed/airline-employed security staff with (presumably) better trained federal employees.
But most of the measures including liquid restrictions, body scanners, pat-downs, increased screening of checked bags, special laptop checks, bans on printer cartridges, no-fly lists, checked-baggage x-rays etc are nothing but expensive unnecessary security theater.
Instead of cutting money from NASA, how about cutting all the spending on these stupid wasteful security measures that do nothing except annoy the flying public and make a lot of money for a few special interests (such as the companies that make all the expensive equipment now operating at airports)
I suspect the reason for the delay request is that some of the computers that remain infected are computers that are important, i.e. if those computers stopped working or stopped being able to connect to the internet, companies would loose money or worse.
If the US government took the money they are spending on unnecessary and unneeded military projects like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and on maintaining expensive-to-run military bases in places like Okinawa and spent it on things that benefit mankind instead, the world would be a far better place.
Google Transit is great plus Transperth publish their GTFS feed data.
Only downside is that you cant use Google Transit on a Nokia N900 Linux phone (I keep meaning to write an app for it but I never got around to it and couldn't be bothered figuring out how to parse the GTFS feed properly)
The FCC has mandated that as of March 2007 all TVs sold in the US (along with all other devices that contain an analog TV tuner such as VCRs, DVD recorders and PVRs) must include an ATSC digital tuner. So yes you cant legally buy a TV set in the US right now without paying money to all the patent holders who hold patents on various parts of the ATSC standard (including those who hold patents on MPEG video and on Dolby AC3 audio)
So many government mandated standards require the use of patented technology. Every single digital TV standard worldwide requires licenses for a hundred or more patents just to build the receiver/decoder. Then you need licenses on top of that to actually decode the audio and video content.
Digital radio is just as bad requiring licenses for various flavors of MPEG audio.
Anyone wanting to set up a mobile phone network or build hardware for one (including handsets) is going to need to license 100s of patents even for the most basic GSM handset.
Wireless data standards like WiFi and WiMax are also heavily patented.
In many cases these patents (or patent pools) require the payment of per-unit royalties where it is impossible for any free-as-in-zero-cost program (be it Free Software, Open Source or otherwise) to ever get a license (I know of at least one game engine that uses a derivative of MPEG audio to store things like music and had to remove support for this from their mod SDK because its impossible to get a license for a MP3 encoder for a free-as-in-zero-cost program no matter how much you pay in license fees)
Along the same lines, it would be impossible to produce a free-as-in-zero-cost DVD player for Linux (closed or open source) because patents on essential components of the DVD standards like MPEG video require the payment of per-unit royalties.
For those who think VP8 and other "open" codecs are the solution, even Google wont be able to stand up to MPEGLA if the holders of the MPEG patents decide to take Google to court and claim that VP8 infringes their patents.
The only way this can change is to get politicians in Washington and Canberra and Brussels and Auckland and Tokyo and Berlin and London and elsewhere who will pass laws eliminating software patents. But that wont happen as long as big companies continue to hold political influence over the worlds governments.
You could always use an open source browser (Chromium, Firefox, whatever) and modify it to ignore the "do not automatically store data for this form" attribute in the HTML form tag.
Or you could write a browser plugin or other tool that is designed to strip that attribute.
How do we convince people that no, the very small threat of terrorism (which is FAR less risky than the government and media make it out to be) is NOT justification for violating the civil liberties of ordinary citizens.
Or is the propaganda from the government and big media companies so effective that its impossible to counter it?
This would be like the cops shutting down an entire block of storage units because someone was storing illicit drugs in one of the units.
If this site was being used for phishing scams the right thing is to notify the owner of the site and ask them to remove the content in question (and to provide copies of that content to the appropriate law enforcement agency if necessary)
The real question is why any school continues to serve things like chicken nuggets (which are not exactly health food) and why school districts have resisted efforts to make school lunches healthier...
They should just make it illegal to use any machine that dials people and plays a recorded message. Anyone wants to reach you (including non-profit organizations, charities, survey organizations, political parties etc), they can employ a bunch of people to ring numbers manually (even if what came down the phone at the other end was a pre-recorded message, if they had to dial the number manually it would be enough to discourage this practice due to the cost of hiring staff to dial)
auto-dialers are one of those inventions the world would be better off without (like the technology Hollywood uses to turn 2D films into crappy-looking near-unwatchable 3D films)
The real problem in this case is the continued existence of that useless waste of space called the HOA.
AT&T needs to totally re-think the way they charge for services.
Eliminate the need to buy a "data plan" to have a smartphone and just have people sign up to different plans.
Bring in new plans that are closer to what it actually costs to provide the services
So a $20 per month plan could have 300 minutes of voice, 100 texts and 500mb of data.
A $50 per moth plan could have 500 minutes of voice, 150 texts and 1GB of data.
And so on with a top tier $100 per month plan having maybe 2000 minutes of voice, 500 texts and 4GB of data.
Any minutes, text or data you use above the plan is charged at the relevant per-minute, per-text or per-megabyte rate.
Oh and change the way charging and billing works so that people no longer have to pay for incoming calls and texts and make the originator of those calls and texts pay instead.
ok, so it not as bad as it sounds because you need to find a public key with P, Q or both matched to the key you want.
e.g. its not like someone is going to be able to take the signing key for the XBOX 360 game disks and magically crack that open unless somehow by magic someone posted another public key out there that has the same public key or Microsoft REALLY screwed up their cryptography.