That's actually incredibly illegal. You're not allowed by the FCC to intentionally put noise out that interferes with other people's equipment.

Also, ALL wifi stuff is considered 'low power' because of it's power levels. It's not talking about 50mw cards in your home router vs the 200mw cards put up on the towers. It's talking about devices which compared to traditional radio equipment is 'low power'. Generally speaking, this is stuff which has a transmission radius of approximately 10-15 miles without amps, etc.

Finally, commercial wireless carriers are a way of providing an alternate means of internet connectivity in places which are notoriously hard to get connected such as dense urban areas (Because you need to get permission from the city to use the right of ways), or rural areas which could cost thousands to run copper or fiber miles out just to get $20-100/month.

And, yes, there are grants for that stuff. But generally speaking it's not very feasible for small companies to do as the government is very strict on how you manage it. It can actually cost a small ISP a large chunk of the grant itself just proving to the government that they're spending the grant the way it was meant to be.

The real problem right now with DFS is that a large chunk of the current 5GHz spectrum (5470-5725) is actually required to use it. So, of the 555MHz, 255 of it is actually more or less unusable for carriers due to the constraints imposed upon it. Since you typically provision a new sector with the current interference in mind, it's possible to set an AP to a "good" channel, and connect a client to it, only to have DFS kick it to a new channel when it hears relevant interference. Causing the AP to move to a subpar channel, possibly one that has a lot of interference on the client end (Because the AP does the choosing, and doesn't take into consideration client noise levels on every channel - too much work when you've got 20-30 clients on one AP).

Anyways, more spectrum is always good. But if we could somehow migrate radar and such away from 5GHz, that would be a huge improvement on wireless broadband speeds. 5GHz is actually used a lot for WISPs as it has a much higher throughput capacity and seems to do better over longer distances than 2.4Ghz.

I'd be interested in seeing what sort of catches comes with this new spectrum being freed up. If it's more DFS spectrum, I don't see how this is really going to help long-term. If it's actually free, clear spectrum being freed than it could actually greatly help WISPs gain more speed as they can reduce the overlap between channels.

I think proximity does cause califonicancer. Everywhere I look, there's people here (In Oregon) attempting to make Oregon more like, well, California of all places. Somehow they get tired of Cali, decide fuck it, let's move! And then want the place they move to be just like the place they left.

Ah, well. Maybe someone will develop some kind of cure. I know, we could have a gold colored ribbon! Oregon for the cure!

If it's windows 7, why are you even bothering to register/activate it seeing as you're just going to reload from an image? FWIW, I've had my son's computer running win7 pro for 6 months without activating it. (Because he was tending to get viruses from "free game" websites, arg). No usability problems at all. Unless you count MSSE not working a problem. Nothing a reload wouldn't fix anyways.

Just out of curiosity, what would happen if a bit had changed over at BB's end? Would it then sync the BB's version of the file over to the client? Also, what about if both ends change at the same time (Highly unlikely, I know). Which side's version would be preferred?

You got a little mixed up on your RAID levels.

RAID 1 is mirroring, so you'd get (45 * 3TB) / 2 = 67.5TB

RAID 0 is concatenating, so you'd get 45 * 3TB = 135TB

You really wouldn't want to do RAID0 for a 'backup' array. :)

Well, there's your problem right there!

Yes, PCs "break". Caps go bad, fans seize (without the owner's knowing), heat sinks become detached.

After repairing computers for 12 years, if you can think of something that's happened to a computer - I've seen it happen. The fact that you have 20 year old working computers doesn't suprise me at all.

I had a gentleman bring in a 486/25 SX (Circa '92 or so). Ran perfectly. No real dust buildup, all original parts. Windows 95 even booted up fine. But I have to tell you, that's a total and complete anomaly. The last time I saw a running 486 was about 10 years ago, and the last time I saw one in that condition was when I was still in high school in the early 90's.

Modern consumer-level computers tend to last about 4 years or so. Heck, even server-grade parts tend to fail with alarming regularity. Honestly, I don't think they're much better than their desktop brethren, just more expensive and oddly enough in more minimal (Re: Cheaper) packaging.

Not only that, but it's also impossible to PUG heroics in BC. I know, I've camped for hours (Admittedly, as DPS) with my aff lock waiting for someone - anyone - on any server - to also queue for them. It just ain't happening.

So the only way you can reliably get into the BC heroics is via either a specialty guild, or attempting (ROFL) to convince your guild that BC stuff is going to be "fun" when they're grinding to get >5k GS to go do ICC (hahaha, sure..)

Anyways, that's what really ticked me off right before I quit about 8 or so weeks ago. After a week of queueing while grinding quests, I did a grand total of... *1* BC heroic. yay.

Pretty much the only "easy" stuff is crap that you use to level. Even the drops in the instances totally suck, and as far as I can tell, the dungeons only exist so you have something, ANYTHING to do after you've wasted all the time you could grinding rep/quests/etc trying to get into the final heroics/raids.

Blah, sorry.

Really? I've been using ubuntu since about 6.04, and I haven't really noticed a dumbing down of the interface. Sure, the default theme's been cleaned up (and changed every damn version), but all the options are still there in System-> Preferences / Administration. The synaptic package manager is still there in 10.10, and the terminal is still included by default, as is aptitude (Or did I install aptitude?).

Anyways, Ubuntu getting easier to use isn't a bad thing. It's not dumbing down, you can still manually do anything you can do in a debian install. It's just not geared towards the hands-on powerusers who want to micromanage their desktop. What's so bad about that? :)

Huh, sort of like... Libraries?

I'm not condoning the actions (or inaction) of people that result in private/personal information being broadcast over wifi.. But, consider that most routers are setup insecure by default AND the people they are targeted to generally are NOT geeks like us, it's reasonable to assume that the people do NOT know that their information is publicly accessible.

I'm not going to put out an analogy, but keep in mind all of yours included someone actively giving out their information.

With these incidents via wifi, the people passively gave it out their information. They likely had no idea until this google thing, and even MORE likely is most people that google got packets from STILL don't know. Why? Because they're not geeks like us, and as such, likely don't even read the stories. Even if they did read the story on what google did, and how badly people's routers are set up, they probably wouldn't think it even applies to them.

Luckily, my first point is getting redressed. I know new linksys routers support a secure setup mechanism, and attempts to set the wep/wpa level to the highest it can and remain compatible with the laptop/device used to set it up. But there's still a long ways to go before the general non-geek populace understands what this jargon means for them.

No. Technically it is spoofing. Every network adapter has a unique address assigned to it, typically stored in some firmware within the NIC itself. The whole purpose is to make that particular interface globally identifiable.

Now, if you change your NIC's MAC to someone ELSE'S MAC, you are spoofing their MAC. IE, you are pretending that your NIC is in fact someone else's, even though it's not. For the sole purpose of attempting to gain access while masquerading as the other device.

That's pretty much the definition of spoofing. Here's a summary definition or two:

Definition of Spoof:

So, what you describe is not spoofing? I think so.

Yea, you really should be modded up.

Mythbusters are NOT scientifically going about replicating experiments to try to reproduce conditions. They're trying to sell entertainment, and as often as not get things half assed or totally wrong.

Noone should be using Mythbusters as a gauge to tell if something is possible or not.