That's right, it is radio science. The delays in signals based on propagation effects are not what GPS measures. It measures the time difference from transmission to reception based on the speed of light. That's part distance, part propagation.
Most uncertainty is locked up in ionospheric conditions which affect how long signal takes to reach receiver. If you have multiple signals on multiple frequencies
RTK does not make use of that potential information. Ionospheric propagation effects depend on frequency but are not fixed.
Even with encrypted signals all GPS receivers are doing is measuring propagation delay.
I have no idea what you think you said here. "Propagation delay" is the delay in a radio signal caused by atmospheric and ionospheric effects and is an error in GPS that is accounted for by external means.
GPS measures the time it takes for a radio signal to travel from the satellites to the receiver, which includes distance and propagation effects. Using just this information you can get a reasonable location.
To deal with propagation effects, you need external data from a fixed station. Since the station is fixed and known, it knows that most of the errors that it sees in its own location are due to propagation effects, and thus it can back-calculate those errors and provide them to other, non-fixed stations. This is called "differential" GPS, or also Wide Area Augmentation System, or WAAS.
For the MOST precise measurements, not only the time delay of the arriving signal is measured, but the carrier phase. Using phase measurements and computing power, the actual number of cycles of the carrier between the satellite and the receiver can be calculated. This results in Real Time Kinematic, or RTK, GPS measurements. These can give you centimeter accuracy for your position.
You are correct in that point, but were missing my point.
You told me not to tell you something that I already didn't tell you. I don't care what your point was, my reply was specific to your claim that printing and mailing paper "magazines" is zero because you receive many of them for free. Period. End of sentence. That's what I told you.
And the costs of producing different materials differs, but that wasn't what you said that I replied to. You get them for free so there is no cost, so why are you now concerned with how much it costs?
I was sharing because few know this fact â" including many scientists.
You're very good at rationalizing. You don't need malware to test your skills at analyzing other people's software. You don't need fully functional malware to test defenses against a specific attack vector. You don't need to intercept your own data, or hold it hostage. The purchasers of the malware weren't antivirus authors. If you aren't ready to use it, then bragging about owning a bit of software that you can use to shut down NHS is meaningless. And law enforcement isn't going to encrypt someone's files and hold them ransom as part of any warrant.
Don't tell me that the price of paper and printing varies that much just by the words put onto the pages.
I didn't tell you that. Did you read what I wrote? I said that you cannot determine that producing a "magazine" is cheap just because you get some of them for free. There are hidden cost-payers for those free magazines.
The assumption that the manufacturer knows the mind of the customer has no place in a legal setting.
If someone is selling a tool that has only illegal uses, it is pretty certain that the mind of the customer is known.
In fact, I'll argue that assumption period does not belong in a courtroom.
The level of proof is "beyond a reasonable doubt" not "beyond all doubt". Sometimes there are assumptions that are so reasonable and with such a high level of probability that they meet the "reasonable doubt" standard without being known as a fact.
Legal ramifications should be based on fact
Convenience store attendant is shot to death. Defendant was seen on a CCTV recording outside the convenience store holding a gun. CCTV shows him entering the store, and then running away. The CCTV inside the store was inoperable. The next person shown on CCTV entering the store called the police. Defendant was captured with a gun in his possession, which ballistics testing showed fired the fatal bullet.
Do we allow the missing "fact" of actually seeing the fatal shot being fired by the defendant prevent a guilty verdict? After all, the defendant could argue that the gun he was holding in the videos was not the murder weapon and that he traded that gun with someone on the street following the murder, and gosh if it isn't just a remarkable coincidence that it turned out to be the murder weapon. Is that a reasonable story? There is no fact that says he did it, but I think his guilt was proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In a court where guilt must be fact he goes free. What do you think?
That's the thing though - there are almost no tools that have no legitimate purposes.
The malware that is the heart of this topic is one of the few.
A 900Mhz frequency scanner can tap cell phone call in the hand of a criminal,
I know of no scanners that can decrypt the digital signals of modern cell phones. When cell was analog, yes.
Even crap like malware CAN have legitimate uses - such as testing of anti-virus products,
You do not need a fully functioning, ready to run attack system to test defenses. There is little question that the author of this code intended it to be used to attack systems in violation of the law.
For me at least though, I wouldn't have had a problem with him writing whatever he likes as long as it never left his computer.
Irrelevant. This is not what happened.
It seems a little odd to me though, that this fine line can be so narrow that the simple act of copying a file can be the difference between being legally ok,
Oh, please. Selling malware to people you know are going to use it to attack other people's systems is not the "simple act of copying a file".
I get what are essentially magazines or journals (in that they are printed on paper) for FREE all the time.
The fact you get them for free doesn't mean they are cheap to produce. All of those trade magazines' costs are paid for by the advertisers who expect you to buy stuff from them. Catalogs are paid for by the company, who expects you to buy stuff from them. Alumni magazines are paid for by donors, who expect you to join them in donating more money.
This is where things get complicated. If he builds the safe cracking device and sells exclusively to licensed locksmiths, is he guilty if one of his devices is stolen and used to rob someone?
Not that complicated. The device was built for a legal purpose, and was sold to a person who was a legal user. What would he be guilty of, conspiracy to use a legal device in a legal way?
Is he guilty if the locksmith he sells to moonlights as a thief?
Same answer. He is not responsible if the legal user uses it for some other purpose.
Is he guilty if he doesn't sell the device to anyone and just keeps it for himself cracking his own safe and those of his friends?
Guilty of what?
A tool is a tool. Neither good nor evil.
A fine rationalization, but untrue. Tools that have legitimate purposes are neither good nor evil, but a tool that has no purpose other than to break the law is not good.
A hammer can be used to drive a nail, or hit someone on the head to kill them. A hammer, therefore, is neither good nor evil. A fully functioning malware program that has no purpose other than attacking other people has no legitimate purpose, therefore it is evil in itself. If the only thing a hammer could be used for was hitting someone on the head to kill them then it would join "malware" as being evil.
It's best to let a jury sort something like this out.
For a jury to sort it out, there has to be a charge and an arrested suspect. That's what is going on now.
If DirecTV Now can give me 90% of the "cable" channels I want to watch for $35/mo (and I just got an email that they just added REELZ) non-promotional pricing (which is actually $10/mo for me because I am an ATT wireless "unlimited" customer), then why can't Spectrum do the same thing?
Because DirecTV Now is not paying your ISP fees or maintaining the wire to your house. Because DirecTV Now is not paying the local broadcast fees because it does not carry the local broadcast channels (my area can get Fox from a local station -- so there is one broadcast fee, not six or more). Spectrum has a lot of infrastructure to maintain while DirecTV Now uses stuff maintained by others, and to whom you pay for that maintenance.
Seriously. Most of the "HD" channels on a typical CableTV carrier like Spectrum are ACTUALLY VOD Streaming sources (which your cable box/DVR nicely makes LOOK like "channels");
Not on Comcast. I don't know what Spectrum does but I suspect it is no different. Making every channel a streaming VOD means you cannot do a channel scan on any tuner to see what channels are valid, which pretty much eliminates all third party products, including things that use CableCARDs.
Even then, the cable carrier has to maintain the wire to your house; DirecTV Now has nothing.
When Comcast in this area (and all of this is specific to this area) added digital service, they added a set of ClearQAM channels above the old analog, and encrypted for premium services.
When they went "digital", they dumped almost all of the analog channels except for two. One was channel 2 which displayed a large text screen saying "you need to get digital service", and whatever it was CSPAN was on. It turns out that CSPAN is/was the go-to channel that all cable boxes turn to when there is an EAS alert. Something like that.
Then they started encrypting it all.
The CableCard is not what handles the video on demand. It does decrypt and tune it, but the handshaking takes place in the set top box. I have an HD Homerun and it cannot handle the VOD.
And no, standard distributed cable channels are not streamed in the normal sense of that word. They are broadcast. They show up in a fixed place as a fixed data stream all the time. How else can a tuner know what channels are available to it, or be able to do a channel scan for valid channels?
The VOD WAS a special case stream, with the data being sent as one of one or more data streams in a normal ClearQAM channel that was otherwise unused. That was what made things fun. You could rescan for channels every so often and find the VOD channels and watch what other people were watching. I remember one night watch a particular racy part of some movie that kept rewinding and playing over and over.
As for new TVs, no of course they can't decode the signal from the cable company.
No, it isn't "of course". It is an economic decision of the cable company, not a technical one. The TV doesn't care if the signal is OTA or cable if it is ClearQAM.
Are you saying newish cable ready TVs can't decode digital signals? OTA has been digital
OTA digital is ClearQAM, unencrypted. Comcast, for one, used to be ClearQAM as well, but switched to encrypted a few years ago here. The modern TV does fine with ClearQAM, with the obvious issues of poor signal resulting in really unviewable channels instead of snowy ones.
When that change happened, I protested to the local office. I spoke to the technical manager. I asked him, if there is only one base level of digital service, why not leave the base level channels clear and either encrypt only the upper tiers or use filters which have been SOP for cable for decades. The guy told me that filters were not good enough to block digital signals -- which is absolute nonsense. It's not like anyone gets a snowy analog signal when a filter is marginal (and I didn't see any marginal filters in all the decades I've had cable), they get NOTHING.
While the second sentence allows a level of ambiguity that many readers may not even spot,
I don't spot it. "Remained... until today...". "Remained is past tense. "Doesn't remain anymore." Had the sentence been "remains... until today", then there is still no ambiguity. Current tense means it still remains.
A 3-second google search comes up with the FCC site with all the details
Thank you for the link.
with a list of all the stations going dark on this report
It is not quite the apocalypse that you make it sound like. The vast majority of those stations that are listed as "go off air" are also CSA "yes". A channel sharing agreement means they become another data stream on an existing broadcaster. I wouldn't call that "going dark" or "cable only", I'd call that a reasonable accommodation to the demand for more mobile services. Yes, if you never rescan for channels on your OTA tuner it will look like they "went dark", but once you do that scan you'll most likely (baring propagation issues) find them again.
Pro, Book, and Studio come with normal Windows 10. Laptop comes with Windows 10 S.
Secure boot applies before the OS is booted, so it doesn't matter which it is. You keep imagining reasons why you can't disable secure boot on Surface devices yet can point to nothing supporting that claim.
Too bad the FCC just held an auction for a lot of the spectrum that these TV stations use. In many markets, half of the stations you can get over the air with "bunny ears" will go dark or cable-only within the next year.
If you are talking about white space, the spectrum is only in places where the stations aren't. Otherwise, citation please.
Wha? I remember pretty much all TVs coming with a built-in antenna, usually of the telescoping variety.
Only some portable TVs. The good, sturdy ones that came in a large wooden box had connectors on the back for an external antenna. That's because the tube amplifiers inside needed more signal than an internal antenna could provide.
1. Most New TVs do not come built in with an Antenna.
Most old TVs did not come with a built-in antenna. You used rabbit ears externally.
Being the Cable stations stink, the Local Channels are still producing new content.
Other than local news programs or a few really bottom rate local celebrity shows ("Rick Dancer TV", e.g., or "Betty Snowden", both local to here. One Portland station has a version of "Today" that is much better, but they're the exception to the rule.), local stations produce nothing but profit by showing either network programming or by striping reruns of popular network programming. Or infomercials.
So you get the channels you want to view over the Antenna.
Depending on conditions, I get anywhere from four to six channels. Four of those (the always ones) are four streams of PBS programming from the transmitter about ten miles away on the local mountaintop. The others are occasional CW and Fox.
Yes, get an amplifier, it "works wonders" one person said. Amplifying noise results in noise. Amplifying the local signal results in distorted signal that doesn't decode properly. I love digital OTA.
Do you realize that Amazon is the world's second biggest e-commerce company?
Different market. I don't want to have to deal with getting a quote or contacting a vendor to tell him what I want, I want to click on the "buy" button and buy it. Amazon does the latter. Alibaba, from every experience I've had with them, is the former.
Yes, if I want to buy 10,000 widgets and need to find a Chinese manufacturer, Alibaba is where I'd go. If I want to buy one I'll go to Amazon. As soon as I see the "price" listed as "Get Quote", I know I'm spending too much time. And then there's the "price" that is "$300-$500". Quite a range for one thing. Only the supplier can tell me the true price, and I'm not wasting time asking him.
You really ought to learn how to use Google. Changing one word (removing "pro") in the Google search that resulted in info on how to turn secure boot off on a Surface Pro yielded
this link, which covers Pro, Book, and Studio. Microsoft themselves are telling people how to turn secure boot off on their Surface devices.
Tell us all again how Microsoft is preventing people from bypassing secure boot.
AFAIK the gov't is supposed to be *already* evaluating such things when they do their purchasing.
It is a good bet that they do not.
Furthermore, this still leave out the consumers who are still getting shafted with shoddy insecure hardware.
Legislating technical standards for production of consumer products often, if not always, has unanticipated side effects. Some of those side effects are good, some are bad. EMI standards, for example, are a good idea in general, but often result in radiation above standards when a consumer uses a product in any way other than what was tested. Or the product costs more and radiates anyway. Or the second and subsequent production runs have what is considered to be a minor engineering change that changes the radiation.
Legislating government procurement standards, however, is a function of the government and has a much lower likelihood of consumer failure.
"Restricted Boot" is a term used by the Free Software Foundation to refer to UEFI Secure Boot
Thank you for the lecture on what UEFI secure boot is.
The terms under which Microsoft licensed Windows RT to OEMs required devices to use Restricted Boot.
This is a Surface Pro. Just a few seconds on Google finds simple instructions for disabling secure boot, with explicit reference to running Ubuntu or even MacOS. Can you cite anything that shows that Microsoft as the OEM is now disabling the ability to disable secure boot on their hardware?
Admittedly, the link I just gave is a few years old. Here's one that is much more recent. Here's one from MS itself talking about Surface Pro 4 and disabling secure boot.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't rocket science.
That's right, it is radio science. The delays in signals based on propagation effects are not what GPS measures. It measures the time difference from transmission to reception based on the speed of light. That's part distance, part propagation.
Most uncertainty is locked up in ionospheric conditions which affect how long signal takes to reach receiver. If you have multiple signals on multiple frequencies
RTK does not make use of that potential information. Ionospheric propagation effects depend on frequency but are not fixed.
Even with encrypted signals all GPS receivers are doing is measuring propagation delay.
I have no idea what you think you said here. "Propagation delay" is the delay in a radio signal caused by atmospheric and ionospheric effects and is an error in GPS that is accounted for by external means.
GPS measures the time it takes for a radio signal to travel from the satellites to the receiver, which includes distance and propagation effects. Using just this information you can get a reasonable location.
To deal with propagation effects, you need external data from a fixed station. Since the station is fixed and known, it knows that most of the errors that it sees in its own location are due to propagation effects, and thus it can back-calculate those errors and provide them to other, non-fixed stations. This is called "differential" GPS, or also Wide Area Augmentation System, or WAAS.
For the MOST precise measurements, not only the time delay of the arriving signal is measured, but the carrier phase. Using phase measurements and computing power, the actual number of cycles of the carrier between the satellite and the receiver can be calculated. This results in Real Time Kinematic, or RTK, GPS measurements. These can give you centimeter accuracy for your position.
You are correct in that point, but were missing my point.
You told me not to tell you something that I already didn't tell you. I don't care what your point was, my reply was specific to your claim that printing and mailing paper "magazines" is zero because you receive many of them for free. Period. End of sentence. That's what I told you.
Journal subscription prices actually charged vary wildly
And the costs of producing different materials differs, but that wasn't what you said that I replied to. You get them for free so there is no cost, so why are you now concerned with how much it costs?
I was sharing because few know this fact â" including many scientists.
I know many scientists, too. Big irrelevant deal.
You're very good at rationalizing. You don't need malware to test your skills at analyzing other people's software. You don't need fully functional malware to test defenses against a specific attack vector. You don't need to intercept your own data, or hold it hostage. The purchasers of the malware weren't antivirus authors. If you aren't ready to use it, then bragging about owning a bit of software that you can use to shut down NHS is meaningless. And law enforcement isn't going to encrypt someone's files and hold them ransom as part of any warrant.
Don't tell me that the price of paper and printing varies that much just by the words put onto the pages.
I didn't tell you that. Did you read what I wrote? I said that you cannot determine that producing a "magazine" is cheap just because you get some of them for free. There are hidden cost-payers for those free magazines.
The assumption that the manufacturer knows the mind of the customer has no place in a legal setting.
If someone is selling a tool that has only illegal uses, it is pretty certain that the mind of the customer is known.
In fact, I'll argue that assumption period does not belong in a courtroom.
The level of proof is "beyond a reasonable doubt" not "beyond all doubt". Sometimes there are assumptions that are so reasonable and with such a high level of probability that they meet the "reasonable doubt" standard without being known as a fact.
Legal ramifications should be based on fact
Convenience store attendant is shot to death. Defendant was seen on a CCTV recording outside the convenience store holding a gun. CCTV shows him entering the store, and then running away. The CCTV inside the store was inoperable. The next person shown on CCTV entering the store called the police. Defendant was captured with a gun in his possession, which ballistics testing showed fired the fatal bullet.
Do we allow the missing "fact" of actually seeing the fatal shot being fired by the defendant prevent a guilty verdict? After all, the defendant could argue that the gun he was holding in the videos was not the murder weapon and that he traded that gun with someone on the street following the murder, and gosh if it isn't just a remarkable coincidence that it turned out to be the murder weapon. Is that a reasonable story? There is no fact that says he did it, but I think his guilt was proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In a court where guilt must be fact he goes free. What do you think?
That's the thing though - there are almost no tools that have no legitimate purposes.
The malware that is the heart of this topic is one of the few.
A 900Mhz frequency scanner can tap cell phone call in the hand of a criminal,
I know of no scanners that can decrypt the digital signals of modern cell phones. When cell was analog, yes.
Even crap like malware CAN have legitimate uses - such as testing of anti-virus products,
You do not need a fully functioning, ready to run attack system to test defenses. There is little question that the author of this code intended it to be used to attack systems in violation of the law.
For me at least though, I wouldn't have had a problem with him writing whatever he likes as long as it never left his computer.
Irrelevant. This is not what happened.
It seems a little odd to me though, that this fine line can be so narrow that the simple act of copying a file can be the difference between being legally ok,
Oh, please. Selling malware to people you know are going to use it to attack other people's systems is not the "simple act of copying a file".
I get what are essentially magazines or journals (in that they are printed on paper) for FREE all the time.
The fact you get them for free doesn't mean they are cheap to produce. All of those trade magazines' costs are paid for by the advertisers who expect you to buy stuff from them. Catalogs are paid for by the company, who expects you to buy stuff from them. Alumni magazines are paid for by donors, who expect you to join them in donating more money.
how many ways can you allocate those k editors between the n journals?
And many of those journals can have i>1 "editors in chief"? All chiefs and no indians makes a very poor organization.
This is where things get complicated. If he builds the safe cracking device and sells exclusively to licensed locksmiths, is he guilty if one of his devices is stolen and used to rob someone?
Not that complicated. The device was built for a legal purpose, and was sold to a person who was a legal user. What would he be guilty of, conspiracy to use a legal device in a legal way?
Is he guilty if the locksmith he sells to moonlights as a thief?
Same answer. He is not responsible if the legal user uses it for some other purpose.
Is he guilty if he doesn't sell the device to anyone and just keeps it for himself cracking his own safe and those of his friends?
Guilty of what?
A tool is a tool. Neither good nor evil.
A fine rationalization, but untrue. Tools that have legitimate purposes are neither good nor evil, but a tool that has no purpose other than to break the law is not good.
A hammer can be used to drive a nail, or hit someone on the head to kill them. A hammer, therefore, is neither good nor evil. A fully functioning malware program that has no purpose other than attacking other people has no legitimate purpose, therefore it is evil in itself. If the only thing a hammer could be used for was hitting someone on the head to kill them then it would join "malware" as being evil.
It's best to let a jury sort something like this out.
For a jury to sort it out, there has to be a charge and an arrested suspect. That's what is going on now.
If DirecTV Now can give me 90% of the "cable" channels I want to watch for $35/mo (and I just got an email that they just added REELZ) non-promotional pricing (which is actually $10/mo for me because I am an ATT wireless "unlimited" customer), then why can't Spectrum do the same thing?
Because DirecTV Now is not paying your ISP fees or maintaining the wire to your house. Because DirecTV Now is not paying the local broadcast fees because it does not carry the local broadcast channels (my area can get Fox from a local station -- so there is one broadcast fee, not six or more). Spectrum has a lot of infrastructure to maintain while DirecTV Now uses stuff maintained by others, and to whom you pay for that maintenance.
Seriously. Most of the "HD" channels on a typical CableTV carrier like Spectrum are ACTUALLY VOD Streaming sources (which your cable box/DVR nicely makes LOOK like "channels");
Not on Comcast. I don't know what Spectrum does but I suspect it is no different. Making every channel a streaming VOD means you cannot do a channel scan on any tuner to see what channels are valid, which pretty much eliminates all third party products, including things that use CableCARDs.
Even then, the cable carrier has to maintain the wire to your house; DirecTV Now has nothing.
When they went "digital", they dumped almost all of the analog channels except for two. One was channel 2 which displayed a large text screen saying "you need to get digital service", and whatever it was CSPAN was on. It turns out that CSPAN is/was the go-to channel that all cable boxes turn to when there is an EAS alert. Something like that.
Then they started encrypting it all.
The CableCard is not what handles the video on demand. It does decrypt and tune it, but the handshaking takes place in the set top box. I have an HD Homerun and it cannot handle the VOD.
And no, standard distributed cable channels are not streamed in the normal sense of that word. They are broadcast. They show up in a fixed place as a fixed data stream all the time. How else can a tuner know what channels are available to it, or be able to do a channel scan for valid channels?
The VOD WAS a special case stream, with the data being sent as one of one or more data streams in a normal ClearQAM channel that was otherwise unused. That was what made things fun. You could rescan for channels every so often and find the VOD channels and watch what other people were watching. I remember one night watch a particular racy part of some movie that kept rewinding and playing over and over.
As for new TVs, no of course they can't decode the signal from the cable company.
No, it isn't "of course". It is an economic decision of the cable company, not a technical one. The TV doesn't care if the signal is OTA or cable if it is ClearQAM.
They are literally opposite things.
Not when the technology is the same.
Are you saying newish cable ready TVs can't decode digital signals? OTA has been digital
OTA digital is ClearQAM, unencrypted. Comcast, for one, used to be ClearQAM as well, but switched to encrypted a few years ago here. The modern TV does fine with ClearQAM, with the obvious issues of poor signal resulting in really unviewable channels instead of snowy ones.
When that change happened, I protested to the local office. I spoke to the technical manager. I asked him, if there is only one base level of digital service, why not leave the base level channels clear and either encrypt only the upper tiers or use filters which have been SOP for cable for decades. The guy told me that filters were not good enough to block digital signals -- which is absolute nonsense. It's not like anyone gets a snowy analog signal when a filter is marginal (and I didn't see any marginal filters in all the decades I've had cable), they get NOTHING.
While the second sentence allows a level of ambiguity that many readers may not even spot,
I don't spot it. "Remained ... until today ...". "Remained is past tense. "Doesn't remain anymore." Had the sentence been "remains ... until today", then there is still no ambiguity. Current tense means it still remains.
A 3-second google search comes up with the FCC site with all the details
Thank you for the link.
with a list of all the stations going dark on this report
It is not quite the apocalypse that you make it sound like. The vast majority of those stations that are listed as "go off air" are also CSA "yes". A channel sharing agreement means they become another data stream on an existing broadcaster. I wouldn't call that "going dark" or "cable only", I'd call that a reasonable accommodation to the demand for more mobile services. Yes, if you never rescan for channels on your OTA tuner it will look like they "went dark", but once you do that scan you'll most likely (baring propagation issues) find them again.
Pro, Book, and Studio come with normal Windows 10. Laptop comes with Windows 10 S.
Secure boot applies before the OS is booted, so it doesn't matter which it is. You keep imagining reasons why you can't disable secure boot on Surface devices yet can point to nothing supporting that claim.
Too bad the FCC just held an auction for a lot of the spectrum that these TV stations use. In many markets, half of the stations you can get over the air with "bunny ears" will go dark or cable-only within the next year.
If you are talking about white space, the spectrum is only in places where the stations aren't. Otherwise, citation please.
Wha? I remember pretty much all TVs coming with a built-in antenna, usually of the telescoping variety.
Only some portable TVs. The good, sturdy ones that came in a large wooden box had connectors on the back for an external antenna. That's because the tube amplifiers inside needed more signal than an internal antenna could provide.
Badgers! Badgers! We don't need no steenkeen badgers!
1. Most New TVs do not come built in with an Antenna.
Most old TVs did not come with a built-in antenna. You used rabbit ears externally.
Being the Cable stations stink, the Local Channels are still producing new content.
Other than local news programs or a few really bottom rate local celebrity shows ("Rick Dancer TV", e.g., or "Betty Snowden", both local to here. One Portland station has a version of "Today" that is much better, but they're the exception to the rule.), local stations produce nothing but profit by showing either network programming or by striping reruns of popular network programming. Or infomercials.
So you get the channels you want to view over the Antenna.
Depending on conditions, I get anywhere from four to six channels. Four of those (the always ones) are four streams of PBS programming from the transmitter about ten miles away on the local mountaintop. The others are occasional CW and Fox.
Yes, get an amplifier, it "works wonders" one person said. Amplifying noise results in noise. Amplifying the local signal results in distorted signal that doesn't decode properly. I love digital OTA.
Do you realize that Amazon is the world's second biggest e-commerce company?
Different market. I don't want to have to deal with getting a quote or contacting a vendor to tell him what I want, I want to click on the "buy" button and buy it. Amazon does the latter. Alibaba, from every experience I've had with them, is the former.
Yes, if I want to buy 10,000 widgets and need to find a Chinese manufacturer, Alibaba is where I'd go. If I want to buy one I'll go to Amazon. As soon as I see the "price" listed as "Get Quote", I know I'm spending too much time. And then there's the "price" that is "$300-$500". Quite a range for one thing. Only the supplier can tell me the true price, and I'm not wasting time asking him.
Surface Pro, yes. Surface Laptop, not so much.
You really ought to learn how to use Google. Changing one word (removing "pro") in the Google search that resulted in info on how to turn secure boot off on a Surface Pro yielded this link, which covers Pro, Book, and Studio. Microsoft themselves are telling people how to turn secure boot off on their Surface devices.
Tell us all again how Microsoft is preventing people from bypassing secure boot.
AFAIK the gov't is supposed to be *already* evaluating such things when they do their purchasing.
It is a good bet that they do not.
Furthermore, this still leave out the consumers who are still getting shafted with shoddy insecure hardware.
Legislating technical standards for production of consumer products often, if not always, has unanticipated side effects. Some of those side effects are good, some are bad. EMI standards, for example, are a good idea in general, but often result in radiation above standards when a consumer uses a product in any way other than what was tested. Or the product costs more and radiates anyway. Or the second and subsequent production runs have what is considered to be a minor engineering change that changes the radiation.
Legislating government procurement standards, however, is a function of the government and has a much lower likelihood of consumer failure.
"Restricted Boot" is a term used by the Free Software Foundation to refer to UEFI Secure Boot
Thank you for the lecture on what UEFI secure boot is.
The terms under which Microsoft licensed Windows RT to OEMs required devices to use Restricted Boot.
This is a Surface Pro. Just a few seconds on Google finds simple instructions for disabling secure boot, with explicit reference to running Ubuntu or even MacOS. Can you cite anything that shows that Microsoft as the OEM is now disabling the ability to disable secure boot on their hardware?
Admittedly, the link I just gave is a few years old. Here's one that is much more recent. Here's one from MS itself talking about Surface Pro 4 and disabling secure boot.