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The Da Vinci Code is a novel and therefore a work of fiction.

Senator Sexton from Dan Brown's Deception Point? Is that you?!

As a HAM, I have met a few who have nifty gear able to tune into cell phones and their 'pings' or tower replies (from post-911 US cellphones) and a few of them have told me that there seems to be more than just pinging or tickling the towers going on. More than is needed to keep up the TX/RX channels open or for simply switching towers based on cell tower capacity and range to the handset.
Others hinted that the removal of the battery does not fully prevent (post-911 US cellphones) from receiving radio frequency energy and replying uniquely (just like RFID tags do but cell phones have Much better antennas).
Links that touch some on this topic:
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=8068
http://jya.com/cell-track.htm
http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/gen/37748res20081112.html
http://allgpstracking.net/gpstracking/index.php/gpstracking/2006/03/12/how_gps_works_gps_tracking
http://ezinearticles.com/?Cell-Phone-Location-Tracking-Information&id=782355
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21442821-Cell-phone-location-tracking-without-telcos-help
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081116-foia-docs-show-feds-can-lojack-mobiles-without-telco-help.html
http://www.danbrown.com/secrets/digital_fortress/cell_phones.html
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3945496.ece
Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but because RFID tags cost only a few cents each, why would similar capability NOT be incorporated into the chips of modern cell phones. Tear down an RFID tag, it is just a very very small semiconductor chip paired to a set of antennas between layers of opaque plastic tape an a sticker backing.
(NOTE: In college, we had fun by carefully removing discovered RFID tags and 'repatriating' them onto different and unrelated merchandise at our local Wal-Mart Supercenter... good times..... not to be confused with the old tried and true bi-metallic strips that loss control departments use which set off the door antenna loops that we all walk through. But sticking one of those to your buddy's jacket made for a good laugh...)

So if that slap-dash story can actually happen, how can any plan counter one of the many *serious* long term Fictional problems??

* Alien, Crimson Tide - Superuser has too much power
* Stark - Everyone hates it and commits suicide
* Celebrity Big Brother - One group starts picking on another
* Robocop 2 - First prototype mission works, but subsequent missions/models cannot *recreate the magic* ?

If things go wrong, will they stop the daily messages back from the deranged crew??

MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW
"Digital Fortress is the best and most realistic techno-thriller to reach the market in years.

Any proof? Other than a book that resides in the fiction part of the library? Or any of the other fictional books that it may or may not be based on?

Maybe they could use it for landing tests for Aurora and all kinds
of secret and non-existent airplanes.

Are you kidding? If Dan Brown says it, it must be true!

Just look here for your proof! See, see, see? Dan Brown says it's true!

I'll bet you want to take your words back now, don't you Mr. Smartypants? :-P

Their megabuck legal team convinced the judge to throw out the case before it could come to trial (by refusing to admit expert testimony). I'm appealing, but meanwhile they are suing me to make me pay more than $300,000 in legal fees to their lawyers

Sony and Random House assert in their legal filings that my blogging about the Da Vinci Code case, my posting of legal documents, expert witness analysis and a discussion of my own books as the originals in the genre constitutes evidence of "improper motivation" which they say justifies me being forced to pay .

Why didn't I sue them first?

As already mentioned on this thread, it's all about megabucks. Random House/Bertelsmann is the world's largest, multibillion-dollar publishing company.

Outclassed in the "all the justice you can pay for" category, I first wrote them a non-threatening letter intending to ask that they give me credit. I had no lawyer, no intention to sue then -- as now -- never any demand for settlement money.

Despite my private and non-threatening approach, Random House launched a thermonuclear "fuck off" fax at me threatening me with financial ruin should I pursue the issue. Their fax was so extreme that it was a big clue that some sort infringement may have happened and that they knew it.

Random House slammed the door on private and civil discussion. But, lacking the megabucks to buy the same measure of justice available to large global corporations, I turned to public disclosure and what better way than blogs, one of which was The Da Vinci Crock

I did this because a couple of years ago, before blogs were so common, I created an online forum called PatheticBell.Com (http://www.patheticbell.com/) concerning the misleading ads and promises of Pacific Bell (now SBC) DSL service. That forum collected enough information from angry users to support several class action lawsuits that brought fines and better service.

Because I had successfully used the Web to bring issues to the public's attention then, I saw no reason not to do so again. The public scrutiny obviously generated more heat than Random House could take, so they filed suit against me in New York where the judges are more friendly toward publishers than here in California.

The judge in question refused to allow my expert witnesses to submit their testimony then ruled in favor of Random House's request to deny a trial on the issues. I am appealing.

BIG APOLOGY: I am sorry for all the badly produced .pdf documents above!

The court filings are only available as CRAPPY .pdfs are scanned from printed pages.

Lawyers do this (instead of creating normal, CPU-sucking Acrobat documents) to make it impossible to text search their filings or to cut and paste from them despite the fact that they are public domain documents.

This

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. (Couldn't resist, just finished reading Digital Fortress).

To elaborate, taken from http://www.danbrown.com/:

"There is one I heard recently that has become somewhat of an urban legend. Although I can't vouch for the accuracy of the story, it's a perfect example of the sorts of things that we now hear happening all the time. Apparently, last year a priest from Utah sent E-mail to his sister in Boston. In his message he mentioned that some local teenagers had stopped by his church that day and baked him brownies. Hoping to impress his sister with his technological wizardry, he borrowed the church's new digital camera and took a photo of the brownies. Then he attached the photo to his E-mail and sent it off. Of course everything should have been fine.

Alas, it was not. In a cruel twist of fate, while typing his E-mail the priest made a single typo that changed his life forever. While writing the phrase "teenagers baked brownies", instead of typing "B" for baked, he missed and hit the letter "N" (the letter directly next to the "B"), resulting in the phrase "teenagers naked brownies."

Because he had unknowingly typed the words "naked" and "teenagers" next to each other in his E-mail, his message was flagged by a secret government computer scanning for child pornographers on the Internet. To make matters worse (much worse) the priest had attached a photo to his E-mail, so his transmission was flagged top-priority for immediate analysis.

When the task force went to examine the photo, however, they found that the file was corrupt and could not be opened. All they knew was that the photo was entitled "Brownies", and it was sent by a priest who was writing about naked teenagers. They tracked the priest's identity through his Internet service provider and secretly began investigating his church. They found to their horror that both the Cub Scouts and the Brownies met at there on a regular basis. They concluded that this priest had been sending pictures of naked Brownies... a felony. They arrested him."

An example of what could happen with this bill.

You mean something like this? Dan Brown is probably working on a book about a concpiracy to blow of a few bombs in order to sell more books about conspiracys.

Far less time for it to be a best seller.

Michael Crichton is the Dan Brown of sci-fi.

More fodder for Dan Brown: The Hipparchus Map, coming soon.

You know this is interesting, I have recently just finished reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Anyone who is familliar with the book will understand why christians might get upset about some of the ideas expressed in it.

I do not doubt the existence of a God, or many Gods, but I do doubt the existence of the christian God (and the deities of every other religion I know as well). While we have made great leaps of understanding since we as a species have gained intelligence, there are and possibly always will be questions that we can not answer. What was there before the big bang ?, for example. A God is as rational an explanation as any other and while you can't prove a Gods existence you can not disprove it either.

But the Bible is not in my opinion anywhere near being reliable evidence. Too much of it conflicts with what we can today sceintifically prove. According to the Bible God made man, fully formed, in one day (probably 10,000 years ago according to most christians), according to evolution life began over 600 million years ago and slowly evolved into us.

To bring this back to The Da Vinci Code, one of the suppositions made is that Jesus Christ was never a divine being, he was not the son of God, he was a mortal man just like you and me. His Divinity was supposedly given to him later on during revisions of the Bible with the aim of making Jesus more inspirational and special than the messiahs of competing religions. Although this seems to have caused a fuss this was a conclusion that I had already come to before I read the book.

I have very little doubt that a man called Jesus existed, there is no smoke without fire so to say that he never existed would be going to far. But I have always believed him to be nothing more than a human who had lead a very productive life, he probably helped many people, he spread his own religion far and he influenced many people. Its because of this that we still talk about him today. But I see no actual evidence of him being special beyond anything natural. Until I see evidence, someone walking on water, magically making bread appear, etc. I can not believe in the christian God.

they either sell the movies [they own the rights to LOTS and LOTS of movies, new and old and yet to be made.] or if you to rip the movie while you rent it or have a download in the right format, they will sell you the recorder...they make the bucks at one end or the other...that's the Sony solution to the whole copywrong battle.

Try not to mention any of the Illuminati connections... that would be rather uncouth.

I read this book right before I jumped into DaVinci code, and really enjoyed both. Brown definitely has a place in his heart for crypto old and new, which was fascinating (even if he did fudge some other details...). Yes, the ending became painfully obvious as the final chapter unfolds, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. After reading both, go to DanBrown.com and try the scavenger hunt- its a clever distraction for a little while.

On the fictional side of this type of thing, those of you into this kinda stuff (like me) should read Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code'. I've read that and 'Angels and Demons'. Both fantastic reads. More Info Here

Coincidentally, I just finished reading "Angels & Demons" by Dan Brown last week. The book talks a little about CERN's work in "recreating the Big Bang" and anti-matter and all that fun stuff. It's a pretty good book about the Illuminati, and it gives you a little look into art history in and around the Vatican as well.

It wasn't as good as "The DaVinci Code" though. (Possibly one of the most interesting books I've ever read.)

NOTE: If you want to read the books, don't look at the pictures on the website until AFTER you read the book(s).

Coincidentally, I just finished reading "Angels & Demons" by Dan Brown last week. The book talks a little about CERN's work in "recreating the Big Bang" and anti-matter and all that fun stuff. It's a pretty good book about the Illuminati, and it gives you a little look into art history in and around the Vatican as well.

It wasn't as good as "The DaVinci Code" though. (Possibly one of the most interesting books I've ever read.)

NOTE: If you want to read the books, don't look at the pictures on the website until AFTER you read the book(s).

Coincidentally, I just finished reading "Angels & Demons" by Dan Brown last week. The book talks a little about CERN's work in "recreating the Big Bang" and anti-matter and all that fun stuff. It's a pretty good book about the Illuminati, and it gives you a little look into art history in and around the Vatican as well.

It wasn't as good as "The DaVinci Code" though. (Possibly one of the most interesting books I've ever read.)

NOTE: If you want to read the books, don't look at the pictures on the website until AFTER you read the book(s).

However, I do remember Dan Brown writing vaguely about a foiled terrorist plot to attack the Stock exchange on Wall Street.

Yes, I believe our stealth ship has been around for a while. Sad that we don't have supersonic missiles on ours. I hope the Afghans don't get this new Russian ship and kick our ass.