The problem is that democratic process has become so broken down thanks to crap like Super-PACs (basically, eliminating what remaining restrictions there were on campaign funding) that the politicians no longer serve the people.
I'm really hoping that Google, Facebook, etc. pursue the "nuclear option" that has been discussed. It will kill SOPA almost instantly, making SOPA politically untouchable. It will also serve as a wakeup call to politicians that they were meant to serve the people, not lobbyists.
At this point, we'll have serious egg on our face for implying that another country is a "bad country" because their politicians didn't want to commit political suicide.
Because they don't even have close to a fraction of a percentage of the budget required to do this.
You are talking millions for just launch costs here.
Look at Iridium - very similar in technical concept to this effort, it is unable to continue operation without MAJOR support from the United States government. (The US military is one of Iridium's largest users now. No one else could afford it.)
There are laws regarding acceptance of advertising - the networks will do all they can to find loopholes, but they can't explicitly block it for being anti-SOPA if the person pays for the ad and follows certain rules and regulations.
Let's not forget that most if not all major governments have demonstrated fairly inexpensive (for a government) ASAT capability, such as the F-15 air-launched ASAT missiles.
Obviously these can only get to LEO, but it's going to take this group a LONG time to be able to even get to LEO - no amateur effort has ever gotten an object into orbit before. Amateur satellites have always piggybacked on commercial launches (early AMSAT sats), had MAJOR fundraising behind them (tens of thousands of dollars for launch costs alone for newer AMSAT launches), or used a "pooled launch" of research microsats with a lifetime before orbital decay of only 1-2 years (such as the CUBESAT project).
No, there's a hell of a lot of other reasons ARM is more power efficient - the core designs themselves are fundamentally more efficient than any x86 core I've ever seen.
Correct, RIL = radio interface layer in this case. I was responding to this in the summary:
"The radio interface layer... still exists as an ATI/Nvidia-esque shim loader scheme with modem 'drivers' being nothing more than ihex files loaded by open code."
Now, in many cases, it is correct that hex files are being loaded by open code on initialization... but the radio baseband firmware of any phone I know of has NEVER been open source. All they are doing is bootloading a separate radio chipset, which has its own processor. It's another thing that doesn't belong in the kernel (you want scary? I have seen some cases where device firmware is stored as gigantic C arrays in header files... An example of something that should NOT be in the kernel...)
On Samsung GalaxyS devices, the modem was attached to a serial port and the RIL translated Android RIL function calls into modem AT commands. The kernel part of the radio interface was a serial port driver, nothing more.
Same for most HTC devices, although some that used Qualcomm MSM implemented a pseudo-tty implemented over shared memory - but it was still AT commands being transferred. Other Qualcomm AMSS functions were implemented using an RPC-over-shared-memory interface, the kernel portion of this was small.
Galaxy S II devices (at least GSM Exynos-based ones) have the radio hung as a USB device off of the CPU, so it did require a driver to implement. Still, most of the RIL is in userland, and the RIL belongs there.
Actually, a privilege escalation exploit IS a security risk.
The unlocked bootloader means that on the Fire, this is at most a small speedbump in the process of modifying a device. However this prevents malware from gaining privilege escalation. (Most of the easiest Android rooting techniques like psneuter and rageagainstthecage relied on exploits that could and WERE also used by malware such as Droid Dream.)
Anyone else could have made Firefox an offer. They didn't.
Oh yeah, and it's only making Google the default - it's really damn easy to change, unlike, for example, the incredibly difficulty of extracting IE from a Windows system.
Microsoft uses their large market share to keep market share, with aggressive vendor lock-in practices.
Google, on the other hand, actively fights against vendor lock-in whenever they can. Gmail can export contacts as CSV, etc.
It's possible to do so - it's just that no one has bothered to write an app suite to use alternative services that can come close to Google Apps. There's nothing preventing anyone from doing so.
I agree on number 2 - my high school class' 12-year reunion (long story, but let's just say that around when the 10th was due to happen was when most of my class were just discovering Facebook and friending each other) would not have happened without Facebook. The school itself had ZERO role in planning any reunion, and didn't even seem to make an attempt. One of our alumni planned the whole thing with help from other classmates on Facebook, held at a local golf course, and it was a resounding success.
It was interesting in that for my high school, a lot of people I knew started growing up near the end of senior year - people I hated for most of my high school career started becoming nice around the end of that time.
I was looking forward to my reunion to see how people had changed over the years - most of those whom I was friends with I have kept in touch with, but at my high school's 12-year reunion ("Better late than another 8" was the motto), a few close friends I hadn't seen in a long time were present, and a lot of people whom I didn't get along with that well back then had changed and became great people, and I've kept in touch since then.
Facebook was not in any way detrimental to our reunion. Apparently tradition is that the senior class president is supposed to do reunions, but ours wanted no part of it. As a result, when our 10th rolled around, people were asking "Hey, is there a reunion? What's the deal?" - The interesting thing was, people were asking on Facebook. The year of our 10th is when many people from my graduating class started joining Facebook and friending each other, even creating a group for our high school class.
Planning for our 11th (a year late) commenced on Facebook, although unfortunately the woman who had the lead role in that received a marriage proposal and had to change focus to wedding planning, the reunion for that year kind of fizzled.
The next year, another alumni decided that there WAS going to be a reunion for our 12th year, and she was going to do whatever it took to make it happen. Again - planning commenced on Facebook and thanks to her leadership we had an excellent 12-year reunion.
Without Facebook, that reunion never would have happened.
1) It's unfortunately looking very likely these will pass. 2) Death warrant or not, you have to follow the law 3) If it passes, the article points out some good legal challenges that will likely cause the act to be struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.
At least, based on what I know of these professors - these professors do have a fairly decent amount of technical knowledge, which is evident in TFA.
In addition, they point out some excellent legal challenges to SOPA/PIPA, which indicate there's a good chance either act would get defeated fairly quickly within the Supreme Court. (See the CDA as an example.)
Out of band or inband, tell me how they are able to monitor what is happening on an applications processor within the handset that has zero support for monitoring of that processor's memory by an external entity?
I don't expect it... If Carrier IQ is replaced with anything on Sprint and AT&T handsets, it will be with something more visible to the user and less invasive, not less visible, with the ability for the user to turn it off.
One of the primary reasons CIQ had such negative publicity was the fact that it was hidden from users and EXTREMELY difficult to turn off.
Trying to replace CIQ with something else when the media and public are now aware of such things would be idiotic on an epic scale
Firmware modders in XDA have been aware of CIQ and removing it whenever it was found for months - the only new development in the past few weeks is that the media finally picked up on it and enduser awareness of it increased because the media picked up on it.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that democratic process has become so broken down thanks to crap like Super-PACs (basically, eliminating what remaining restrictions there were on campaign funding) that the politicians no longer serve the people.
I'm really hoping that Google, Facebook, etc. pursue the "nuclear option" that has been discussed. It will kill SOPA almost instantly, making SOPA politically untouchable. It will also serve as a wakeup call to politicians that they were meant to serve the people, not lobbyists.
At this point, we'll have serious egg on our face for implying that another country is a "bad country" because their politicians didn't want to commit political suicide.
Because they don't even have close to a fraction of a percentage of the budget required to do this.
You are talking millions for just launch costs here.
Look at Iridium - very similar in technical concept to this effort, it is unable to continue operation without MAJOR support from the United States government. (The US military is one of Iridium's largest users now. No one else could afford it.)
There are laws regarding acceptance of advertising - the networks will do all they can to find loopholes, but they can't explicitly block it for being anti-SOPA if the person pays for the ad and follows certain rules and regulations.
Let's not forget that most if not all major governments have demonstrated fairly inexpensive (for a government) ASAT capability, such as the F-15 air-launched ASAT missiles.
Obviously these can only get to LEO, but it's going to take this group a LONG time to be able to even get to LEO - no amateur effort has ever gotten an object into orbit before. Amateur satellites have always piggybacked on commercial launches (early AMSAT sats), had MAJOR fundraising behind them (tens of thousands of dollars for launch costs alone for newer AMSAT launches), or used a "pooled launch" of research microsats with a lifetime before orbital decay of only 1-2 years (such as the CUBESAT project).
Yeah... $299 would be worth it for an Android tablet with these specs, but not a Playbook.
Basically, it's $100 more than a Fire for extra storage - after all the Fire is almost identical hardware-wise.
Let's not forget the significant negative environmental impacts of drilling for gas.
It may burn clean, but it sure as hell doesn't extract clean. Take a trip to Dimock, PA for a good example.
The base airframe (Kaman K-MAX) has been operational since 1991.
In terms of FAA certification, it's a lot easier to modify an existing certified platform than to create a new one.
That's why, for example, you see so many different variants of the Sikorsky S-70/H-60 Blackhawk/Seahawk/Pavehawk/otherhawk
No, there's a hell of a lot of other reasons ARM is more power efficient - the core designs themselves are fundamentally more efficient than any x86 core I've ever seen.
So far I can't even find any reference to the RIL/modem drivers anywhere in TFA or any other links...
Looks like just another case of the submitter being an uneducated whiner trying to sensationalize.
Correct, RIL = radio interface layer in this case. I was responding to this in the summary:
"The radio interface layer ... still exists as an ATI/Nvidia-esque shim loader scheme with modem 'drivers' being nothing more than ihex files loaded by open code."
Now, in many cases, it is correct that hex files are being loaded by open code on initialization... but the radio baseband firmware of any phone I know of has NEVER been open source. All they are doing is bootloading a separate radio chipset, which has its own processor. It's another thing that doesn't belong in the kernel (you want scary? I have seen some cases where device firmware is stored as gigantic C arrays in header files... An example of something that should NOT be in the kernel...)
On nearly all devices the RIL is in userland.
On Samsung GalaxyS devices, the modem was attached to a serial port and the RIL translated Android RIL function calls into modem AT commands. The kernel part of the radio interface was a serial port driver, nothing more.
Same for most HTC devices, although some that used Qualcomm MSM implemented a pseudo-tty implemented over shared memory - but it was still AT commands being transferred. Other Qualcomm AMSS functions were implemented using an RPC-over-shared-memory interface, the kernel portion of this was small.
Galaxy S II devices (at least GSM Exynos-based ones) have the radio hung as a USB device off of the CPU, so it did require a driver to implement. Still, most of the RIL is in userland, and the RIL belongs there.
Actually, a privilege escalation exploit IS a security risk.
The unlocked bootloader means that on the Fire, this is at most a small speedbump in the process of modifying a device. However this prevents malware from gaining privilege escalation. (Most of the easiest Android rooting techniques like psneuter and rageagainstthecage relied on exploits that could and WERE also used by malware such as Droid Dream.)
You're correct - Google does some light bundling with single-sign-on.
However, they go to great efforts to allow their various individual products to be used with software outside of their "bundle".
Look at gmail's robust POP/IMAP support.
Look at Google Calendar's robust support for open calendar formats
In general - look at Google's approach in general to data availability, such as Google Takeout.
Anyone else could have made Firefox an offer. They didn't.
Oh yeah, and it's only making Google the default - it's really damn easy to change, unlike, for example, the incredibly difficulty of extracting IE from a Windows system.
Microsoft uses their large market share to keep market share, with aggressive vendor lock-in practices.
Google, on the other hand, actively fights against vendor lock-in whenever they can. Gmail can export contacts as CSV, etc.
http://www.dataliberation.org/ - this is about as far from a monopolistic practice as you can get.
It's possible to do so - it's just that no one has bothered to write an app suite to use alternative services that can come close to Google Apps. There's nothing preventing anyone from doing so.
Not with added stabilization electronics such as those found in quadcopters (because they NEED electronic stabilization to fly at all...)
I agree on number 2 - my high school class' 12-year reunion (long story, but let's just say that around when the 10th was due to happen was when most of my class were just discovering Facebook and friending each other) would not have happened without Facebook. The school itself had ZERO role in planning any reunion, and didn't even seem to make an attempt. One of our alumni planned the whole thing with help from other classmates on Facebook, held at a local golf course, and it was a resounding success.
It was interesting in that for my high school, a lot of people I knew started growing up near the end of senior year - people I hated for most of my high school career started becoming nice around the end of that time.
I was looking forward to my reunion to see how people had changed over the years - most of those whom I was friends with I have kept in touch with, but at my high school's 12-year reunion ("Better late than another 8" was the motto), a few close friends I hadn't seen in a long time were present, and a lot of people whom I didn't get along with that well back then had changed and became great people, and I've kept in touch since then.
Facebook was not in any way detrimental to our reunion. Apparently tradition is that the senior class president is supposed to do reunions, but ours wanted no part of it. As a result, when our 10th rolled around, people were asking "Hey, is there a reunion? What's the deal?" - The interesting thing was, people were asking on Facebook. The year of our 10th is when many people from my graduating class started joining Facebook and friending each other, even creating a group for our high school class.
Planning for our 11th (a year late) commenced on Facebook, although unfortunately the woman who had the lead role in that received a marriage proposal and had to change focus to wedding planning, the reunion for that year kind of fizzled.
The next year, another alumni decided that there WAS going to be a reunion for our 12th year, and she was going to do whatever it took to make it happen. Again - planning commenced on Facebook and thanks to her leadership we had an excellent 12-year reunion.
Without Facebook, that reunion never would have happened.
1) It's unfortunately looking very likely these will pass.
2) Death warrant or not, you have to follow the law
3) If it passes, the article points out some good legal challenges that will likely cause the act to be struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.
At least, based on what I know of these professors - these professors do have a fairly decent amount of technical knowledge, which is evident in TFA.
In addition, they point out some excellent legal challenges to SOPA/PIPA, which indicate there's a good chance either act would get defeated fairly quickly within the Supreme Court. (See the CDA as an example.)
So - utterly and completely irrelevant.
Out of band or inband, tell me how they are able to monitor what is happening on an applications processor within the handset that has zero support for monitoring of that processor's memory by an external entity?
I don't expect it... If Carrier IQ is replaced with anything on Sprint and AT&T handsets, it will be with something more visible to the user and less invasive, not less visible, with the ability for the user to turn it off.
One of the primary reasons CIQ had such negative publicity was the fact that it was hidden from users and EXTREMELY difficult to turn off.
Trying to replace CIQ with something else when the media and public are now aware of such things would be idiotic on an epic scale
Firmware modders in XDA have been aware of CIQ and removing it whenever it was found for months - the only new development in the past few weeks is that the media finally picked up on it and enduser awareness of it increased because the media picked up on it.
Note the word "demo" in two of the three domainnames there.
CIQ almost surely tried to sell CarrierIQ to Verizon, and those hosts were likely part of their demo to Verizon.
Whatever the reason for those hosts existing, not a single deployed Android handset on Verizon had the ability to send data to any of those hosts.
Um, SNMP is not implemented in hardware, it's software.
You clearly don't know jack shit about Android if you think SNMP is how software updates are pushed to Android handsets.