If you have any student loans, universities in the United States are required to report your last date of attendance, if you are attending at least half time or not, and other information to the National Student Loan Data System. This may be an automated way that they are trying to get information for this.

While I imagine universities are not going to rush to using the last date you showed up in class versus the current date for refund and grading (withdrawal with no grade versus withdrawal-failing/withdrawal-pass, etc.), I could easily see universities using this data in the event of a grade dispute or similar issue.

A slightly clarification here:

UMA service with T-mobile is basically a way to use 802.11 access points as an alternative "cell phone tower" with T-mobile. Nothing stops you from using a UMA-capable phone with standard GSM cell phone towers (unless you tell the phone not to).

In general, T-mobile bills UMA calls *the same* as calls started on the cell phone network. So if you have a post-paid plan, UMA usage typically comes out of your normal minute bucket(s); if you are using a $0.10/minute pre-paid plan, you pay $0.10/minute (as the previous poster mentioned).

There are NO additional fees required for UMA calling versus GSM calling. Turning on 802.11 support might reduce your phone's battery life between charges though.

That said, there used to be some add-on plans which allowed unlimited UMA-initiated calls for a flat rate. But these no longer seem to be offered. In general, the future of T-Mobile's UMA service is unknown, as it is primarily Blackberry phones that tend to support it.

While they may sound different, the Cloud Computing security problem seems to be almost identical to any other Digital Rights Management problem. Both are concerned with only exposing what the information owner wants exposed to the underlying hardware/provider/user/etc.

It's just a question of whose "Cloud" you are trying to secure information on, and who the "user" of said information is supposed to be.

Having seen devices like these in the past, chances are it is a telecommunications device for the deaf, in this case designed for payphones.

I presume there would have been instructions printed on the front of the device that would go something like this: If a deaf or hard-of-hearing person wants to make a phone call, they insert coins, then dial the number of interest. When they see the light on the other end flashing randomly (i.e. not a ringing or busy signal), they can press a key on the payphone's touch-tone pad a few times to cause a prerecorded voice to announce the TTD's presence.

If the party on the other side starts typing with their own Teletype device, the TTD on the payphone will then open up to reveal its own display and keyboard. The reason it cannot be opened up without hearing a remote TTD first (at least on the units I have seen) is to prevent vandalism on what is obviously an uncommon and slightly expensive piece of equipment.