Technically speaking the child continues to be harmed long after the making of the content. Imagine for a moment that you were victimized in some way. It doesn't have to be sexually, though certainly sexual abuse tends to be one of the more scarring forms of psychological trauma. Now imagine that your victimization was captured on film, and long after the abuse was over, you are periodically reminded of that abuse because the pictures of it resurface somewhere on the net.
Heck just the KNOWING that there are people out there who are watching it for their own sick pleasure would be enough to add on years of therapy for most victims. Add in the potential for someone you know to see your victimization (even accidentally, plenty of people upload child pornography to sites just to get off on shocking people who see it, take a look at 4chan for example), and recognize you from it. There's plenty of ways that continuing to distribute bits and bytes of computer data that represents child pornography harms the people involved.
Basically if you had a top of the line phone 2 years ago it can probably run ICS, it might be a little sluggish, but it's doable. I had an epic4g (basically sprint's version of the original galaxy s line) and it runs ICS fine via cyanogenmod 9. I haven't looked into budget android phones in a while, but I'd hope that most things bought in the last 6 months or so would have the specs to run ICS, since there's been 2 years of time for moore's law to catch up.
On the consumer side, 90% of smart phone customers don't use even 15% of what their devices are capable of doing. For most consumers, the questions, "Can it go online?", "Can it make phone calls and send texts?", "Does it have some stupid little games I can put on it to pass the time when I'm bored?", and "Does it work reasonably well without being too confusing for me to figure out" are all they care about. That functionality has been available long before android 2.3 even hit the scene, never mind 4.0.
The average consumer doesn't understand nor care about the differences between OS versions on really anything, computers, smartphones, whatever. As long as it does that one thing(s) that they want, most are satisfied. Now if they're exposed to a new feature from a new version they might grow to like it and use it, but chances are unless they're already a techie and looking into that sort of thing, most users won't care about it until there's some game/app/thing they want to do with their current device/OS and can't. Plus, unless they happen to be fairly tech savvy and aren't afraid of voiding warranties and what not the consumer is at the whim of their device manufacturers and carriers to get them updated software. So it's no surprise most people just stick with what they have if it works 'good enough'
From a manufacturer point of view they've already sold the product, maintaining updates costs them money, so they're disinclined to spend money on a product that's already sold. There's some work done on flagship products, and maybe a little bit just to earn enough goodwill with their customers that they'll keep coming back, but like all corporations they balance expenses for 'customer service' very carefully. For most corporations, customer service isn't about doing what's right for the customer, it's about doing enough to keep most of the customers happy, but not cost the company a fortune.
There's a little more incentive on the carrier's end to keep things updated, since their customers are paying for a service, not for hardware, and I'm sure that there's some push from the carriers to get their devices updated. But even then that costs money, so it's really only going to be their most popular devices that get attention, and less popular ones will fall by the wayside.
Tl;dr most people figure if it ain't broke, don't fix it
Serious medical crisis aside, all I can picture in my head right now is Paul Ryan wearing a brain slug from Futurama, "Poor little guy starved to death"
Your argument is slightly flawed, roads are a public resource, you can only fit so many cars on any given road, and if those cars don't behave in a way which is predictable to other drivers then travel time would be erratic, and the danger of crashes is increased. Further without rules and an enforcement process if someone felt like being an asshole, they could simply park their 18 wheeler across the street and stop anyone from going anywhere. We have traffic laws because the road is a public place and without agreeing on some common rules they would be unusable. You are not giving up your freedom to speed, you are agreeing that if you want to use public roads you won't speed on them. If you however had a private road you could drive your car anyway you like on it, at any speed and any amount of recklessness.
If I was using a public computer with agreed upon rules about how the machine would be used to ensure the safety and security of others I would have no problem operating within a walled garden, it's not my hardware, and if I want to use it the owner is perfectly justified at setting rules on how it is to be used. However if it's MY hardware, why does some other company have the right to decide what I can and can't do with my hardware. Now if I was either too lazy or unskilled to properly secure my hardware I have the right to allow some other company to do it for me by creating a 'walled garden' as it were, but I should always have the right to say screw you I want to run this program anyways, acknowledging the risks involved. If I want to let someone else handle the responsibility of securing my device that's fine, but I shouldn't HAVE to let someone else handle that responsibility.
This would largely be the same as the owner of a private road hiring a private security company to police their road and make sure that drivers on it obey whatever rules you institute, but you always have the right to fire that security company.
Instead what we have is a situation where I can buy a private road (piece of computing hardware), and the company I buy it from says, "ok you can only use your road (computer) to do these certain things we have already decided are allowable, otherwise we'll stop you from doing it"
Screw that, if I want to drive around like a mad man (expose my personal information to potential identity thieves), flip my car (have my banking info exposed to a Nigerian prince), and leave be hind some flaming wreckage (have all my money stolen) on my own private road (personal computing hardware) I should be allowed to.
Well you could argue that re flashing it is specialized knowledge, and depending on the level of 'bricking' may require specialized software that the manufacturer uses. I've heard the term semi-bricked tossed around a bit in the development community so that might be a valid alternative terminology.
Still I don't think their use of the term bricked is wrong. If the device won't boot and needs to be reflashed before you can do anything with it, I'd qualify that as 'bricked'
So we're building a faster more powerful android now? I wonder if the end result will be an energy draining old man, or a cocky teenager who's destined to become part of a biological super weapon.
Gandalf the Grey + Gandalf the White + Monty Python and the Holy Grail's Black Knight + Benito Mussolini + The Blue Meanie + Cowboy Curtis + Jambi the Genie + Robocop + Terminator + Captain Kirk + Darth Vader + Lo Pan + Superman + Every Single Power Ranger + Bill S. Preston + Theodore Logan + Spock + The Rock + Doc Ock + Hulk Hogan > Chuck Norris
Really now? When have you ever known a publicly held company to prioritize development and long term results, over short term profits. Shareholders are far too concerned with making that profit number bigger for the next quarter to worry about what's coming down the pike in a couple years. Take solar panels as a prime example. A company that put commercial grade heating/energy panels on their office building could save huge amounts of money in energy/heating costs. Solar energy is essentially free, the maintenance requirements of solar panels minimal, and the life time of a solar array 20-40 years. However there is a not insignificant upfront cost to install a solar array. In most cases it would take a company 5 years to 'break even' compared to traditional energy sources. Thus, since the cost to put something like that in place on an office building is expensive, and would eat into a companies profits NOW, while only providing savings much later, most companies choose to use traditional heating/energy sources, because they're much cheaper NOW, even though the costs of them will only continue to add up.
People never do anything until someone gets hurt. Despite people predicting these sort of dangers, no one could actually get the government to step in and enforce communication standards until someone died from it. I'm sure there are similar examples throughout history, when cars first came to be on the road for example. Or various accidents at factories around the world.
It's an interesting bit of human nature, people are lazy, and if they can avoid doing something they usually will.
See, this is what happens when we allow corporations to have a 'voice' in politics by spending money on campaign contributions. A law which was suppressed by overwhelming public opposition (SOPA) can creep back into the system because there are some (arguably powerful) corporations in favor of it.
I support (along with a lot of other people) amending the constitution to get rid of this kind of loophole. I think the Move To Amend people got the right idea.
With an amendment like that in place maybe we'd actually see candidates pandering to their constituents instead of whatever corporate interests contributed the most to their campaign fund.
Your SSN by itself is fairly useless, however just a small amount of personal information (Such as your name, possibly date of birth) combined with SSN is enough to effectively steal someone's identity. Identity thieves, presuming they want to steal your identity, aren't above manufacturing 'legitimate looking' credentials, and not everyone who is supposed to 'verify' that information is as vigilant as you'd hope.
Plus there are plenty of places online, or over the phone where checking an ID is impossible, so provided the person who's ID you're stealing has a clean credit check, you'd be amazed at how many places will approve you for something with no real verification process at all.
There's probably a medical reason for that too. I am not a medical biologist so frankly I have no idea what goes into making a vaccine, but I'm sure that while in many situations it might just be cheaper to use egg products in the vaccine productions, I'm willing to bet that there's at least a couple of vaccines that for whatever reason can't be produced with anything but egg products.
> The dangers associated with nuclear power are very much analogous to flying in an airplane vs. driving a car for a long trip
I don't think so. An airplane falling can actually improve avionics in the afterward years; radioactive contamination is hard to remove.
Your points about coal only make it certain using coal or nuclear energy are both bad options. Personally, I find geothermal energy better, if available.
Radioactive contamination is hard to remove, but again it affects a relatively small percentage of the earth. It affects that small percentage dramatically, but still a small percentage (and I would still argue a smaller percentage than oil and coal pollution does). Also accidents like that do actually help us to make better nuclear plants, for one, by analyzing how it failed we know where improvements should be made in the future.
And you yourself highlight the major problem with geothermal energy: availability. Actually that's the problem with most alternative energy sources, they've generally got insufficient availability to feed the needs of an industrialized nation.
Nuclear energy isn't perfect, there's certainly risks involved, but I think that all things considered they're acceptable risks, especially with some of the newer meltdown proof thorium molten salt designs. It's just that getting it out of the planning board and into use that is hard, too many people get terrified of any technology that has the word 'nuclear' in it.
Hey his salary is at least as justifiable an expense as a tabloid magazine editor's. They're both providing a service that is related to an entertainment medium. Granted it's a wildly different demographic of people who are entertained by SuDoKu vs who care about who Katy Perry happens to be dating, but in the grand scheme of society I don't think it's any less justifiable.
Of course then there's the arguement that all entertainment is extraneous to society, which I also disagree with (but that's another can of worms entirely).
I tend to consider this as very stupid, as the dangers clearly outweigh any benefit, but I'll post this idea for the sake of protecting the heroes that have to give their lives because the idiot weasels first lied to get power and then betrayed their voters by choosing the alternative that is unsafe.
The dangers associated with nuclear power are very much analogous to flying in an airplane vs. driving a car for a long trip. Statistically speaking you're more likely to have a car acident than a plane crash. Likewise more people die every year from car acidents than plane crashes.
That said a car crash has a lot lower fatality rate than plane crashes, plenty of people walk away relatively unscathed from a car crash, and even if they don't a car crash has the potential to kill maybe a dozen people if it's really bad. On the other hand a plane crash is almost certainly fatal (assuming the plane got off of the runway), and given that most passanger carry a hundred people or more, a plane crash is a much more serious event for those involved.
There are plenty of unpublished deaths associated with coal or oil power (the primary alternatives to nuclear), mining accidents etc. (not to mention the untabulated costs of pollution and environmental damage) Compared to what, 3 major nuclear events over the past 60 years, each of which had it's costs in life and environmental damages.
The Point is that while each has it's costs in human life and damage to the environment, nuclear power generally has more devastating accidents that happen rarely, while coal and oil have much less devastating accidents that I'd wager happen much more frequently than most people are aware of (I'd even bet the total cost in human lives to be proportionally higher for coal and oil, adjusted for percentage of total power provided of course)
I expect that something like this would be radically successful, but it's an option that shouldn't be utilized except in dire circumstances (such as against SOPA) otherwise it'll end up like wikimedia's 'personal appeal from Jimmy Wales' where people would generally ignore it and go about their business.
Hopefully there is an internet 'blackout' in this situation, but amazon, google, et all don't make this a regular thing.
Good to see voting with your wallet still works. I e-mailed all of those companies informing them that I was going to boycott their products because of their support of SOPA. Hopefully my e-mail played at least some small part in their decision. It'd be nice if they publicly announced their change in stance, but I'll take this as a small victory for democracy.
This means with 4g, US may get phone compatibility from different carriers finally. It might take them a while, though, as LTE only phones wouldn't exist for another 5-6 years.
There's going to be so much fragmentation on LTE that likely most devices will only support a couple of the frequencies required. Plus the US cell carriers are going to do everything they can to make sure the devices are software locked to their specific service. Plus unless the major carriers agree to use the same frequencies for their LTE services, the phones themselves might not physically be capable of operating on other networks than their home network.
Unlike 3G, 4G (LTE) networks can carry both data and voice on the same channel, as well as being more spectrum efficient. It would be wise for ATT to deploy LTE as fast as they can while removing the less efficient 3G phones from the market. This means eventually LTE would be deployed everywhere, and whet it does, even the dumb phones will use LTE for voice, leaving much more room for data for others.
See my above comment about no plan ever surviving contact with the enemy.
How long did it take to fully phase out AMPS after TDMA and CDMA cell phones became common place? There are plenty of people (particularly the elderly who are 'set in their ways') that are STILL using TDMA or early generation CDMA devices. While LTE might be the ultimate goal, it'll be years before it can be implemented. This spectrum purchase is a step in that direction, but at this point who knows if that's where we'll end up, or if something completely different will come along.
The plan is that they'll be able to provide better LTE based mobile broadband. But then no plan ever survived contact with the enemy. If you want cheap wireless, you're not using one of the big 4 companies anyways. If you want better coverage, well voice coverage is probably already about as good as it's gonna get, the costs to provide coverage to the 1% of people who aren't already saturated are proportunately not worth the return, and Data coverage is more focused on providing faster speeds in key markets with LTE than providing even '3g' speeds in the fringe areas where it's not saturated. Frankly the spectrum is why AT&T wanted t-mobile in the first place, and since that deal fell through this is the next best thing for them.
Essentially the way true crypt handles hidden volumes is thus. It creates a container volume, of a size you specify. Using a key you specify. When you input that key you open that container volume, and you can fill it up with whatever you want, lolcats, prawnography whatever. You set the size of your container volume, let's say for example at 20gb
Now you also create a 'hidden volume' inside that container. The hidden volume is designed to occupy the free space in the volume and it is obviously created to be smaller than the container volume. For our example, we'll say the hidden volume is 15gb.
The hidden volume uses a different encryption key. There's no way since the container is already encrypted (causing all the free space to essentially look like random garbage) to tell that there's a hidden volume contained within the free space of the volume, unless you know the key to decrypt it.
I'm over simplifying it a bit but that's the jist of how a hidden container works. And since we know that the hidden volume is 15gb, that leaves us 5 gb on the container volume to fill up with stuff you want people to think you care about keeping secret but don't really. The container file will report that it has 20gb total storage space to the system and anyone looking at it, but you'll actually only have 5gb of space to work with because if you put more than that in you'll corrupt your hidden volume by overwriting the 'free space' at the end of the container.
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Technically speaking the child continues to be harmed long after the making of the content. Imagine for a moment that you were victimized in some way. It doesn't have to be sexually, though certainly sexual abuse tends to be one of the more scarring forms of psychological trauma. Now imagine that your victimization was captured on film, and long after the abuse was over, you are periodically reminded of that abuse because the pictures of it resurface somewhere on the net.
Heck just the KNOWING that there are people out there who are watching it for their own sick pleasure would be enough to add on years of therapy for most victims. Add in the potential for someone you know to see your victimization (even accidentally, plenty of people upload child pornography to sites just to get off on shocking people who see it, take a look at 4chan for example), and recognize you from it. There's plenty of ways that continuing to distribute bits and bytes of computer data that represents child pornography harms the people involved.
Basically if you had a top of the line phone 2 years ago it can probably run ICS, it might be a little sluggish, but it's doable. I had an epic4g (basically sprint's version of the original galaxy s line) and it runs ICS fine via cyanogenmod 9. I haven't looked into budget android phones in a while, but I'd hope that most things bought in the last 6 months or so would have the specs to run ICS, since there's been 2 years of time for moore's law to catch up.
On the consumer side, 90% of smart phone customers don't use even 15% of what their devices are capable of doing. For most consumers, the questions, "Can it go online?", "Can it make phone calls and send texts?", "Does it have some stupid little games I can put on it to pass the time when I'm bored?", and "Does it work reasonably well without being too confusing for me to figure out" are all they care about. That functionality has been available long before android 2.3 even hit the scene, never mind 4.0.
The average consumer doesn't understand nor care about the differences between OS versions on really anything, computers, smartphones, whatever. As long as it does that one thing(s) that they want, most are satisfied. Now if they're exposed to a new feature from a new version they might grow to like it and use it, but chances are unless they're already a techie and looking into that sort of thing, most users won't care about it until there's some game/app/thing they want to do with their current device/OS and can't. Plus, unless they happen to be fairly tech savvy and aren't afraid of voiding warranties and what not the consumer is at the whim of their device manufacturers and carriers to get them updated software. So it's no surprise most people just stick with what they have if it works 'good enough'
From a manufacturer point of view they've already sold the product, maintaining updates costs them money, so they're disinclined to spend money on a product that's already sold. There's some work done on flagship products, and maybe a little bit just to earn enough goodwill with their customers that they'll keep coming back, but like all corporations they balance expenses for 'customer service' very carefully. For most corporations, customer service isn't about doing what's right for the customer, it's about doing enough to keep most of the customers happy, but not cost the company a fortune.
There's a little more incentive on the carrier's end to keep things updated, since their customers are paying for a service, not for hardware, and I'm sure that there's some push from the carriers to get their devices updated. But even then that costs money, so it's really only going to be their most popular devices that get attention, and less popular ones will fall by the wayside.
Tl;dr most people figure if it ain't broke, don't fix it
It can't hurt right?
Serious medical crisis aside, all I can picture in my head right now is Paul Ryan wearing a brain slug from Futurama, "Poor little guy starved to death"
If I was using a public computer with agreed upon rules about how the machine would be used to ensure the safety and security of others I would have no problem operating within a walled garden, it's not my hardware, and if I want to use it the owner is perfectly justified at setting rules on how it is to be used. However if it's MY hardware, why does some other company have the right to decide what I can and can't do with my hardware. Now if I was either too lazy or unskilled to properly secure my hardware I have the right to allow some other company to do it for me by creating a 'walled garden' as it were, but I should always have the right to say screw you I want to run this program anyways, acknowledging the risks involved. If I want to let someone else handle the responsibility of securing my device that's fine, but I shouldn't HAVE to let someone else handle that responsibility.
This would largely be the same as the owner of a private road hiring a private security company to police their road and make sure that drivers on it obey whatever rules you institute, but you always have the right to fire that security company.
Instead what we have is a situation where I can buy a private road (piece of computing hardware), and the company I buy it from says, "ok you can only use your road (computer) to do these certain things we have already decided are allowable, otherwise we'll stop you from doing it"
Screw that, if I want to drive around like a mad man (expose my personal information to potential identity thieves), flip my car (have my banking info exposed to a Nigerian prince), and leave be hind some flaming wreckage (have all my money stolen) on my own private road (personal computing hardware) I should be allowed to.
Doomsday device? Aha! Now the ball's in Farnsworth's court.
Still I don't think their use of the term bricked is wrong. If the device won't boot and needs to be reflashed before you can do anything with it, I'd qualify that as 'bricked'
So we're building a faster more powerful android now? I wonder if the end result will be an energy draining old man, or a cocky teenager who's destined to become part of a biological super weapon.
And Simpsons, well, sort of. Simpsons has been going downhill for a while too, but it's still better than 90% of the crap out there.
Gandalf the Grey + Gandalf the White + Monty Python and the Holy Grail's Black Knight + Benito Mussolini + The Blue Meanie + Cowboy Curtis + Jambi the Genie + Robocop + Terminator + Captain Kirk + Darth Vader + Lo Pan + Superman + Every Single Power Ranger + Bill S. Preston + Theodore Logan + Spock + The Rock + Doc Ock + Hulk Hogan > Chuck Norris
Really now? When have you ever known a publicly held company to prioritize development and long term results, over short term profits. Shareholders are far too concerned with making that profit number bigger for the next quarter to worry about what's coming down the pike in a couple years. Take solar panels as a prime example. A company that put commercial grade heating/energy panels on their office building could save huge amounts of money in energy/heating costs. Solar energy is essentially free, the maintenance requirements of solar panels minimal, and the life time of a solar array 20-40 years. However there is a not insignificant upfront cost to install a solar array. In most cases it would take a company 5 years to 'break even' compared to traditional energy sources. Thus, since the cost to put something like that in place on an office building is expensive, and would eat into a companies profits NOW, while only providing savings much later, most companies choose to use traditional heating/energy sources, because they're much cheaper NOW, even though the costs of them will only continue to add up.
Good to see the US government isn't the only ones.
People never do anything until someone gets hurt. Despite people predicting these sort of dangers, no one could actually get the government to step in and enforce communication standards until someone died from it. I'm sure there are similar examples throughout history, when cars first came to be on the road for example. Or various accidents at factories around the world.
It's an interesting bit of human nature, people are lazy, and if they can avoid doing something they usually will.
See, this is what happens when we allow corporations to have a 'voice' in politics by spending money on campaign contributions. A law which was suppressed by overwhelming public opposition (SOPA) can creep back into the system because there are some (arguably powerful) corporations in favor of it.
I support (along with a lot of other people) amending the constitution to get rid of this kind of loophole. I think the Move To Amend people got the right idea.
With an amendment like that in place maybe we'd actually see candidates pandering to their constituents instead of whatever corporate interests contributed the most to their campaign fund.
Your SSN by itself is fairly useless, however just a small amount of personal information (Such as your name, possibly date of birth) combined with SSN is enough to effectively steal someone's identity. Identity thieves, presuming they want to steal your identity, aren't above manufacturing 'legitimate looking' credentials, and not everyone who is supposed to 'verify' that information is as vigilant as you'd hope. Plus there are plenty of places online, or over the phone where checking an ID is impossible, so provided the person who's ID you're stealing has a clean credit check, you'd be amazed at how many places will approve you for something with no real verification process at all.
There's probably a medical reason for that too. I am not a medical biologist so frankly I have no idea what goes into making a vaccine, but I'm sure that while in many situations it might just be cheaper to use egg products in the vaccine productions, I'm willing to bet that there's at least a couple of vaccines that for whatever reason can't be produced with anything but egg products.
> The dangers associated with nuclear power are very much analogous to flying in an airplane vs. driving a car for a long trip
I don't think so. An airplane falling can actually improve avionics in the afterward years; radioactive contamination is hard to remove.
Your points about coal only make it certain using coal or nuclear energy are both bad options. Personally, I find geothermal energy better, if available.
Radioactive contamination is hard to remove, but again it affects a relatively small percentage of the earth. It affects that small percentage dramatically, but still a small percentage (and I would still argue a smaller percentage than oil and coal pollution does). Also accidents like that do actually help us to make better nuclear plants, for one, by analyzing how it failed we know where improvements should be made in the future.
And you yourself highlight the major problem with geothermal energy: availability. Actually that's the problem with most alternative energy sources, they've generally got insufficient availability to feed the needs of an industrialized nation.
Nuclear energy isn't perfect, there's certainly risks involved, but I think that all things considered they're acceptable risks, especially with some of the newer meltdown proof thorium molten salt designs. It's just that getting it out of the planning board and into use that is hard, too many people get terrified of any technology that has the word 'nuclear' in it.
Hey his salary is at least as justifiable an expense as a tabloid magazine editor's. They're both providing a service that is related to an entertainment medium. Granted it's a wildly different demographic of people who are entertained by SuDoKu vs who care about who Katy Perry happens to be dating, but in the grand scheme of society I don't think it's any less justifiable.
Of course then there's the arguement that all entertainment is extraneous to society, which I also disagree with (but that's another can of worms entirely).
For a dyslexic, nuclear is unclear.
I tend to consider this as very stupid, as the dangers clearly outweigh any benefit, but I'll post this idea for the sake of protecting the heroes that have to give their lives because the idiot weasels first lied to get power and then betrayed their voters by choosing the alternative that is unsafe.
The dangers associated with nuclear power are very much analogous to flying in an airplane vs. driving a car for a long trip. Statistically speaking you're more likely to have a car acident than a plane crash. Likewise more people die every year from car acidents than plane crashes.
That said a car crash has a lot lower fatality rate than plane crashes, plenty of people walk away relatively unscathed from a car crash, and even if they don't a car crash has the potential to kill maybe a dozen people if it's really bad. On the other hand a plane crash is almost certainly fatal (assuming the plane got off of the runway), and given that most passanger carry a hundred people or more, a plane crash is a much more serious event for those involved.
There are plenty of unpublished deaths associated with coal or oil power (the primary alternatives to nuclear), mining accidents etc. (not to mention the untabulated costs of pollution and environmental damage) Compared to what, 3 major nuclear events over the past 60 years, each of which had it's costs in life and environmental damages.
The Point is that while each has it's costs in human life and damage to the environment, nuclear power generally has more devastating accidents that happen rarely, while coal and oil have much less devastating accidents that I'd wager happen much more frequently than most people are aware of (I'd even bet the total cost in human lives to be proportionally higher for coal and oil, adjusted for percentage of total power provided of course)
I expect that something like this would be radically successful, but it's an option that shouldn't be utilized except in dire circumstances (such as against SOPA) otherwise it'll end up like wikimedia's 'personal appeal from Jimmy Wales' where people would generally ignore it and go about their business. Hopefully there is an internet 'blackout' in this situation, but amazon, google, et all don't make this a regular thing.
Good to see voting with your wallet still works. I e-mailed all of those companies informing them that I was going to boycott their products because of their support of SOPA. Hopefully my e-mail played at least some small part in their decision. It'd be nice if they publicly announced their change in stance, but I'll take this as a small victory for democracy.
This means with 4g, US may get phone compatibility from different carriers finally. It might take them a while, though, as LTE only phones wouldn't exist for another 5-6 years.
Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it, http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobile-technology/report-spectrum-fragmentation-will-result-in-costlier-lte-smartphones-181968
There's going to be so much fragmentation on LTE that likely most devices will only support a couple of the frequencies required. Plus the US cell carriers are going to do everything they can to make sure the devices are software locked to their specific service. Plus unless the major carriers agree to use the same frequencies for their LTE services, the phones themselves might not physically be capable of operating on other networks than their home network.
Unlike 3G, 4G (LTE) networks can carry both data and voice on the same channel, as well as being more spectrum efficient. It would be wise for ATT to deploy LTE as fast as they can while removing the less efficient 3G phones from the market. This means eventually LTE would be deployed everywhere, and whet it does, even the dumb phones will use LTE for voice, leaving much more room for data for others.
See my above comment about no plan ever surviving contact with the enemy.
How long did it take to fully phase out AMPS after TDMA and CDMA cell phones became common place? There are plenty of people (particularly the elderly who are 'set in their ways') that are STILL using TDMA or early generation CDMA devices. While LTE might be the ultimate goal, it'll be years before it can be implemented. This spectrum purchase is a step in that direction, but at this point who knows if that's where we'll end up, or if something completely different will come along.
The plan is that they'll be able to provide better LTE based mobile broadband. But then no plan ever survived contact with the enemy.
If you want cheap wireless, you're not using one of the big 4 companies anyways. If you want better coverage, well voice coverage is probably already about as good as it's gonna get, the costs to provide coverage to the 1% of people who aren't already saturated are proportunately not worth the return, and Data coverage is more focused on providing faster speeds in key markets with LTE than providing even '3g' speeds in the fringe areas where it's not saturated.
Frankly the spectrum is why AT&T wanted t-mobile in the first place, and since that deal fell through this is the next best thing for them.
Essentially the way true crypt handles hidden volumes is thus. It creates a container volume, of a size you specify. Using a key you specify. When you input that key you open that container volume, and you can fill it up with whatever you want, lolcats, prawnography whatever. You set the size of your container volume, let's say for example at 20gb
Now you also create a 'hidden volume' inside that container. The hidden volume is designed to occupy the free space in the volume and it is obviously created to be smaller than the container volume. For our example, we'll say the hidden volume is 15gb.
The hidden volume uses a different encryption key. There's no way since the container is already encrypted (causing all the free space to essentially look like random garbage) to tell that there's a hidden volume contained within the free space of the volume, unless you know the key to decrypt it.
I'm over simplifying it a bit but that's the jist of how a hidden container works. And since we know that the hidden volume is 15gb, that leaves us 5 gb on the container volume to fill up with stuff you want people to think you care about keeping secret but don't really. The container file will report that it has 20gb total storage space to the system and anyone looking at it, but you'll actually only have 5gb of space to work with because if you put more than that in you'll corrupt your hidden volume by overwriting the 'free space' at the end of the container.