We don't need a manned mission to get rid of this wayward and useless piece of former satellite space junk... we just need to blast it out of the path it's going to some other one.
AMC-11 (the threatened satellite) is a major backbone in the pay TV infrastructure for the Eastern USA. What that means, is that channels like MTV, VH1, G4, NESN, and many more use AMC-11 to get the content from their master control to your local cable system, DirecTV, and Dish in order for them to replicate the signal on their platform. If AMC-11 is jammed, ALL platforms will lose the affected channels... and there's no one place in space with enough free space to hold them all, so relocating for a temp outage isn't really an option.
Online service backtracks after privacy overshare. We'll monitor this story overnight and have a full report to you on the Really Early Local News. We start before normal people wake up.
Actually, most of that $5-7 "extra outlet with box" fee is going to the content providers. They want to be paid per TV rather than per subscriber. Even your network affiliated broadcasters collect a fee for being redistributed by cable, and they want an accurate count that those boxes provide.
You don't have to get the cable company box, you could get a newer CableCARD-based "Digital Cable Ready" TV or a TiVo.
Expect the rest of your analog channels to drop in 2012. Newer networks like FIOS and U-Verse are being built without any analog service at all. Digital is just uses less bandwidth... and that can be re-purposed to HD and Internet for the rest of us.
That contingency plan is to post a card saying "This channel is experiencing a problem. Don't call, we're aware of the problem and it'll resolve itself in three weeks."
It's not like there's a full satellite slot worth of vacancies out there for backups. And for those that do have backups, where are they going to get the backup for their backup now that it's the primary?
At least this failure is predictable... LMN-HD could send a few Blu-Ray disks full of movies-with-commercial-breaks out to cable headends so nothing seems wrong, but the fact is, this is a problem that people will have to deal with.
A hit satellite could be moved back into place rather quickly, ground control just has to notice and fire thrusters. If a satellite is hit and broken, an in-orbit spare can be brought into use and a new spare one launched with little disruption.
The threat here is a non-responsive full-power bird moving too close to the victim satellite and staying there for 3 weeks. You can't move anybody new into this slot, they'd be equally jammed too. Something's going to have to give, or we're going to see a full satellite's load have to move elsewhere, and that's going to create a traffic jam on the other satellites. Suddenly your late local news is having it's reporter phone-in because they can't get link.
You're confusing the issue. The wayward satellite is useless, and all of it's content has been moved elsewhere. The problem is the late-May to early-June threat to AMC-11's signals... which is still functional and "evasive maneuvers" for it are planned to keep it's signals going, but the jury's out as to whether this is going to work.
D* and E* have huge receive points where they have to acquire the feed of most of the networks they carry in the same way they're sent to cable before they can upload them to their dedicated bandwidth. In other words, if G4 East on AMC-11 is interrupted, it'll fail on of all the services that look for that feed.
You apparently have never watched DirecTV on a day when the major birds are hit by the sun being right behind them. It's a bad picture on dozens of channels, followed by a signal fail of those on the affected bird, then back to the bad picture, and then in 20 minutes or so it's over. This could be worse... a longer interruption that doesn't happen when most people are at work. Think Boston would be happy with a total NESN outage?
Yes, but it carries a WAAS signal which your consumer "GPS" unit uses to increase the accuracy it's measurements. So, if this gets too far out of position without shutting off, your consumer GPS might get confused. Exact impact hasn't been computed yet.
Thing is... that 1998 event left several lesser-known cable channels holding the back as bigger-money former Galaxy IV customers used their pre-empt rights on the other birds to keep themselves on the air. A natural supply/demand price increase situation arose from this.
The SkyTel service never recovered. Customers of that service were migrated to cellular-based pagers.
Well, in this case, maybe it is. With a projected path that sends it in the way of a major TV carrying satellite, and furthermore the transmission payload still blasting out signal at the same frequencies, this could knock many networks off many cable systems at the same time. That's pretty high on the "avoid this" list.
When dial-up was unlimited... it required you tie up a phone line while you were online, and in some rural locations it also meant a per-minute phone call charge.
When it comes down to it now... there's The Regional Phone Company and The Regional Cable TV Company. They own the wires connected to your home... and we've proven internet over sewer pipe and power line just isn't effective. Anybody providing DSL has to rent access to the phone company's copper. Earthlink has deals to borrow some cable wires, otherwise you must go through the cable company. Nobody but the phone company has access to the FIOS/U-Verse style networks, in the few places they exist.
Yep... competition has gone down dramatically, but service quality has gone way up. Gotta take what you can get.
Uhm... the liberals are running the show in the USA right now. The only power the Republicans have left is the threat of filibuster in the Senate. They can delay, but they can't stop anything.
For those of you just joining us, it may be easy to forget the days when consumer Internet access wasn't unlimited. Dial-up connections were called "56K" but actually around 40-53K in practical use, and services like AOL and Prodigy billed by the hour to look at your e-mail, post on limited message boards, and use their clunky early Web browsers.
Unlimited service isn't a right, it was just a trend that started when a price war broke out because there were far too many ISPs. There were even a few national ISPs back then that offered free access if you were willing to look at ads on your screen. Natural selection shut these companies down and a string of mergers leave us basically back where we started with the Bells dominant and their upstart competitors being the already-hated cable TV providers.
If this leads to a $20 a month 5 GB at 1 Mbps plan I'd have it installed at my grandmother's house where there's no computer and no cell phone service in an instant for the family to use while we're visiting. Right now, the cheapest non-dialup plan is an $35 for 1 Mbps DSL that isn't worth it.
The point of this is that if there's DNA evidence that's 98% sure and nothing else, that's not good enough for a conviction. If there's other facts that confirm the DNA's finger-pointing, then there's enough to convict.
The Supreme Court has given science the legal definition that a "beyond a reasonable doubt" equates to 99.9% certainty... a system that is wrong 10% of the time or more needs at to at least be much times more accurate before it's going to be trusted. You're only allowed one blooper in 1000 by this standard. Nice tech, but it's not there yet.
And that's a save for the "Um, you're doing something odd here... are you sure?" system. That extra dialog box most likely prompted the question to you, which saved the day. Yeah, the IT admin might want the control to Just assume the user clicked "No!"... but I don't know the number of times where the IT guys have locked out the custom code I was paid by them to develop because it tripped a "changed.exe" flag. Yes, I'm the developer and you own the software... yes, I think we can trust that changed.exe file for this one time and for and for as long as I'm here. What, the guy who oversees both of us haven't told you they hired me?:)
Yeah, there should be some sort of "You can trust us, we're your textbook author and we included VBA macros in order to..." note somewhere in the book near the first introduction. Then again, if they were using VBA to prevent copying by students and not telling them about it, then that textbook should be burned.
Everybody on Windows uses.exe functionality... and this kind of thing is the basis for allowing or disallowing network connections from suspect applications. It's a last line of defense against newly discovered threats, and works well in combination with Anti-virus which can stop known threats, but has no way of knowing about today's new threat.
They used to say there was no way an image file or text doc could spread a computer virus... then buffer overruns were discovered in image handlers, and Microsoft added VBA macros that basically had the full power of Visual Basic at its disposal to Office, and away it went!
Now, I make my living writing Visual Basic, so there's no way I want to see VBA going away. Still there needs to be some safety to prevent a VBA macro from using unknowing users' computers from flooding the Internet with useless traffic... and the solution is pretty simple: If an Office doc contains VBA code, a warning is shown to the user asking them if they trust the source of the file, and would like the code to be enabled. If the user declined, macros won't run but users can see the static content in the file.
So.. that's the solution being employed here. They're effectively saying "Hey, this PDF is using network functionality, do you trust it to do that?" That should shut off the threat vector while still allowing the functionality to be used in trustworthy situations... why isn't this something in Adobe's official reader yet?
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We don't need a manned mission to get rid of this wayward and useless piece of former satellite space junk... we just need to blast it out of the path it's going to some other one.
Only problem is that those local channels use satellites to get the network and syndicated programs they air.
List of tenants on the threatened bird, as I mentioned yesterday.
While this is going to take out almost all of the East Coast feeds of MTV Networks... it's also going to down Discovery Networks and C-SPAN too.
AMC-11 (the threatened satellite) is a major backbone in the pay TV infrastructure for the Eastern USA. What that means, is that channels like MTV, VH1, G4, NESN, and many more use AMC-11 to get the content from their master control to your local cable system, DirecTV, and Dish in order for them to replicate the signal on their platform. If AMC-11 is jammed, ALL platforms will lose the affected channels... and there's no one place in space with enough free space to hold them all, so relocating for a temp outage isn't really an option.
Online service backtracks after privacy overshare. We'll monitor this story overnight and have a full report to you on the Really Early Local News. We start before normal people wake up.
Actually, most of that $5-7 "extra outlet with box" fee is going to the content providers. They want to be paid per TV rather than per subscriber. Even your network affiliated broadcasters collect a fee for being redistributed by cable, and they want an accurate count that those boxes provide.
You don't have to get the cable company box, you could get a newer CableCARD-based "Digital Cable Ready" TV or a TiVo.
Expect the rest of your analog channels to drop in 2012. Newer networks like FIOS and U-Verse are being built without any analog service at all. Digital is just uses less bandwidth... and that can be re-purposed to HD and Internet for the rest of us.
That contingency plan is to post a card saying "This channel is experiencing a problem. Don't call, we're aware of the problem and it'll resolve itself in three weeks."
It's not like there's a full satellite slot worth of vacancies out there for backups. And for those that do have backups, where are they going to get the backup for their backup now that it's the primary?
At least this failure is predictable... LMN-HD could send a few Blu-Ray disks full of movies-with-commercial-breaks out to cable headends so nothing seems wrong, but the fact is, this is a problem that people will have to deal with.
A hit satellite could be moved back into place rather quickly, ground control just has to notice and fire thrusters. If a satellite is hit and broken, an in-orbit spare can be brought into use and a new spare one launched with little disruption.
The threat here is a non-responsive full-power bird moving too close to the victim satellite and staying there for 3 weeks. You can't move anybody new into this slot, they'd be equally jammed too. Something's going to have to give, or we're going to see a full satellite's load have to move elsewhere, and that's going to create a traffic jam on the other satellites. Suddenly your late local news is having it's reporter phone-in because they can't get link.
You're confusing the issue. The wayward satellite is useless, and all of it's content has been moved elsewhere. The problem is the late-May to early-June threat to AMC-11's signals... which is still functional and "evasive maneuvers" for it are planned to keep it's signals going, but the jury's out as to whether this is going to work.
D* and E* have huge receive points where they have to acquire the feed of most of the networks they carry in the same way they're sent to cable before they can upload them to their dedicated bandwidth. In other words, if G4 East on AMC-11 is interrupted, it'll fail on of all the services that look for that feed.
You apparently have never watched DirecTV on a day when the major birds are hit by the sun being right behind them. It's a bad picture on dozens of channels, followed by a signal fail of those on the affected bird, then back to the bad picture, and then in 20 minutes or so it's over. This could be worse... a longer interruption that doesn't happen when most people are at work. Think Boston would be happy with a total NESN outage?
Yes, but it carries a WAAS signal which your consumer "GPS" unit uses to increase the accuracy it's measurements. So, if this gets too far out of position without shutting off, your consumer GPS might get confused. Exact impact hasn't been computed yet.
Thing is... that 1998 event left several lesser-known cable channels holding the back as bigger-money former Galaxy IV customers used their pre-empt rights on the other birds to keep themselves on the air. A natural supply/demand price increase situation arose from this.
The SkyTel service never recovered. Customers of that service were migrated to cellular-based pagers.
Well, in this case, maybe it is. With a projected path that sends it in the way of a major TV carrying satellite, and furthermore the transmission payload still blasting out signal at the same frequencies, this could knock many networks off many cable systems at the same time. That's pretty high on the "avoid this" list.
Here's a list of what AMC-11 is used for on Lyngsat.
Basically, if this wayward sat gets in the way, the average cable/DBS subscriber in the USA is going to wonder where half their digital channels went.
When dial-up was unlimited... it required you tie up a phone line while you were online, and in some rural locations it also meant a per-minute phone call charge.
When it comes down to it now... there's The Regional Phone Company and The Regional Cable TV Company. They own the wires connected to your home... and we've proven internet over sewer pipe and power line just isn't effective. Anybody providing DSL has to rent access to the phone company's copper. Earthlink has deals to borrow some cable wires, otherwise you must go through the cable company. Nobody but the phone company has access to the FIOS/U-Verse style networks, in the few places they exist.
Yep... competition has gone down dramatically, but service quality has gone way up. Gotta take what you can get.
Uhm... the liberals are running the show in the USA right now. The only power the Republicans have left is the threat of filibuster in the Senate. They can delay, but they can't stop anything.
For those of you just joining us, it may be easy to forget the days when consumer Internet access wasn't unlimited. Dial-up connections were called "56K" but actually around 40-53K in practical use, and services like AOL and Prodigy billed by the hour to look at your e-mail, post on limited message boards, and use their clunky early Web browsers.
Unlimited service isn't a right, it was just a trend that started when a price war broke out because there were far too many ISPs. There were even a few national ISPs back then that offered free access if you were willing to look at ads on your screen. Natural selection shut these companies down and a string of mergers leave us basically back where we started with the Bells dominant and their upstart competitors being the already-hated cable TV providers.
If this leads to a $20 a month 5 GB at 1 Mbps plan I'd have it installed at my grandmother's house where there's no computer and no cell phone service in an instant for the family to use while we're visiting. Right now, the cheapest non-dialup plan is an $35 for 1 Mbps DSL that isn't worth it.
The point of this is that if there's DNA evidence that's 98% sure and nothing else, that's not good enough for a conviction. If there's other facts that confirm the DNA's finger-pointing, then there's enough to convict.
The Supreme Court has given science the legal definition that a "beyond a reasonable doubt" equates to 99.9% certainty... a system that is wrong 10% of the time or more needs at to at least be much times more accurate before it's going to be trusted. You're only allowed one blooper in 1000 by this standard. Nice tech, but it's not there yet.
You don't keep your private info in a sandbox, and some programs need your private info in order to do what they're designed to do.
And that's a save for the "Um, you're doing something odd here... are you sure?" system. That extra dialog box most likely prompted the question to you, which saved the day. Yeah, the IT admin might want the control to Just assume the user clicked "No!"... but I don't know the number of times where the IT guys have locked out the custom code I was paid by them to develop because it tripped a "changed .exe" flag. Yes, I'm the developer and you own the software... yes, I think we can trust that changed .exe file for this one time and for and for as long as I'm here. What, the guy who oversees both of us haven't told you they hired me? :)
Yeah, there should be some sort of "You can trust us, we're your textbook author and we included VBA macros in order to..." note somewhere in the book near the first introduction. Then again, if they were using VBA to prevent copying by students and not telling them about it, then that textbook should be burned.
Everybody on Windows uses .exe functionality... and this kind of thing is the basis for allowing or disallowing network connections from suspect applications. It's a last line of defense against newly discovered threats, and works well in combination with Anti-virus which can stop known threats, but has no way of knowing about today's new threat.
They used to say there was no way an image file or text doc could spread a computer virus... then buffer overruns were discovered in image handlers, and Microsoft added VBA macros that basically had the full power of Visual Basic at its disposal to Office, and away it went!
Now, I make my living writing Visual Basic, so there's no way I want to see VBA going away. Still there needs to be some safety to prevent a VBA macro from using unknowing users' computers from flooding the Internet with useless traffic... and the solution is pretty simple: If an Office doc contains VBA code, a warning is shown to the user asking them if they trust the source of the file, and would like the code to be enabled. If the user declined, macros won't run but users can see the static content in the file.
So.. that's the solution being employed here. They're effectively saying "Hey, this PDF is using network functionality, do you trust it to do that?" That should shut off the threat vector while still allowing the functionality to be used in trustworthy situations... why isn't this something in Adobe's official reader yet?