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DoD Dreams of Efficient Spectrum Usage
Unstrung writes "US Military research agency DARPA is sick of all those static-filled cellphone calls and dropped connections too. The shadowy eggheads are working on a way of using the bandwidth available today more efficiently."
Does this mean I'll be able to d/l hi-res pr0n onto my cellphone-pda-in-one device? Mmm, I can almost see it now. What about live sex-streams? That'd make cellphone companies big $$!
GSM has the worst spectral efficiency of any deployed digital cellular system.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
yeah, those advantages plus the fact that i can use my gsm phone pretty much anywhere in the world except america. actually that works out well, 90% of americans don't have passports, and you'd have to be nuts to visit america as a non-citizen since you have no rights.
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Great - if they can't even make their own workers efficent, what hope do they have when it comes to spectra? Then again even if they do make it more efficient, if people are using it less efficiently (by browsing /. all day) it'd negate the efficiency savings.
Video Game cheats, hints a
passports have a 10 year life (at the most, you can get a 5 year passport if iirc). assume that 6 million passports were issued per year for the past 10 years. that's 60 million. at most. total us population is something like 350 million. let's make the numbers easy and say the population is just 300 million.
so, with the numbers highly skewed in your favor, you're right: 80%, not 90%, of americans lack passports. so, 80% of americans can't easily go to countries with gsm - no great loss. and since non-us citizens can be brought before a military tribunal, it's probably not a good idea to go on holiday in the usa if you're not a citizen, so there's no need to be bummed about the lack of a gsm network.
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