On a smartphone though, the threat isn't that the thief will get your phone and rack up a bill. It's that they can get all your personal data. Contacts, usernames for any sites/services you use on the phone, etc.
Worse: most people have their mail application set to remember password. So they can read all your mail, or send mail pretending to be you. Similarly with apps like Facebook - these are generally left logged in/password remembered. So even if your various passwords are long and difficult to guess, this is moot if they protected only via a 4 digit number on the phone.
Minecraft concentrates on the creationism/building. There's no end-game goals, there's not much in the way of RPG/adventure elements (yet) - it's basically virtual Lego. I like that and I'm still playing it obsessively (big projects take months or years to build unless you hack, so I can see myself playing it for a while yet).
Terraria focuses more on the exploration/gear/adventure elements and less on building. It has a far greater array of droppable/craftable/mineable items and a more complex gear/stats system. But you can't really build anything amazing in it like Minecraft (since it's 2D). There's also some identifiable 'end game' goals which MC doesn't really have, and the world is finite etc.
They are superficially similar games, but in reality, made for two different types of gamer. If you prefer adventurey spelunking elements without having to just sit there mining huge amounts of resources to build stuff, Terraria is great. If you don't really care too much for hacking monsters up and finding items, but just want to build some awesome structures, Minecraft.
I like both TBH, but I think Minecraft will have more long-term appeal.
Nah not really. It's still thought of as google.com to most people, even though they are using the local variant 99 times out of 100.
For me I just type "google" in the bar. The browser adds 'www.' and '.com'. And then, Google redirects me to the local (Australian) version www.google.com.au
Though there is a link right below the search bar to "go to Google.com" (which takes you to the main site). I rarely use it though unless I'm specifically looking for results ~not~ about my local area (e.g. researching travel information in other countries).
To be honest, as a native English speaker who has spoken with many Dutch people online (I was in a predominantly Dutch guild in an MMO for many years and spent a lot of time on Ventrilo), their English is by and large excellent. Better than most idiots here seem to be capable of.
You even beat (not by much, mind you) my own country (Australia), which is already considered to have fairly low violent crime statistics by world standards. Murders here are between 260 and 290 per year here over the last decade (for a population of ~22 million).
Interestingly, France and the UK are almost exactly the same as Australia, around 1.3/100,000. So although Paris or London themselves might be more dangerous, that doesn't seem to translate to the entire country. The US' statistic is also surprising: 5.0 per 100,000 - the highest among OECD countries by a long shot (though still comparatively safe compared to the majority of countries in the world). Finland also caught my eye as being unusual: 2.8/100,000 - considerably higher than all the other northern European countries that surround it, for some odd reason.
Yeah I have thought about turning off IPv4 and going IPv6 only just for kicks (i.e. to be amazed at how few sites I can access, and how badly broken the ones I can access are). But I never got around to it. Sounds like I'm not missing out on much.
The last 64 bits of the address can be whatever you want, as the entire/64 space is allocated to you. So it can't really be a land-grab... it's only the ~first~ 64 bits of the address that are unique and assignable.
Yes... no problems at all here (I have a native IPv6 connection, not tunnelled). This isn't really very surprising - these sites have mostly been resolvable and accessible via IPv6 for a long time through alternate domains (e.g. ipv6.google.com, www.v6.facebook.com). All that changed is that they have now published AAAA records for the ~main~ domains as well.
You can't get much that you'd actually ~want~ to use for under about $700-800 where I live. But yes that's still not "thousands".
But no, the reason that I said that was that my parents always just buy the most expensive "x" they can find when they need to buy an "x". They don't understand PCs, but they reason that the most expensive one must be better, so go for that one. They do the same for everything else: TVs, stereo systems, toasters, washing machines, you name it;)
Put it this way, the last machine they bought was a Dell. They just went onto the Dell website and maxed out most of the options and ended up with a $4000 machine. I/facepalmed a little at the time, but in retrospect it probably wasn't a bad purchase given that it lasted over 6 years for them (and frankly, still runs quite well for basic tasks).
You ~can~ get computers that cheap in some areas (particularly the US). They aren't quite as cheap in the country I live in, though the most basic models Dell sells aren't much more - starting at ~$650 USD. Given that a 16 GB WiFi-only iPad is $400-and-something, though, I'd still recommend the latter over the former for some users.
BUT, I tell you, I've used a few of the entry level HPs and Dells and Acers etc. in my time and they are utterly awful. Horrible, horrible machines, loaded with crapware that slows them down to a crawl (which yes, can be remedied but we are talking about novice users here remember) and using incredibly cheap parts that simply won't last as long as a decent $1500+ computer that a slashdotter would build themselves using decent quality parts that they've hand-picked after careful consideration and plenty of review reading. Meanwhile the iPad has excellent build quality, and the scope of things that can go wrong with it is smaller. And it's cheaper than the entry level PCs (netbooks compete on price with it, but cheap netbooks are just as bad as cheap PCs).
Think about it. Users like you and I want, and will always want, a 'real computer' with a real OS and the ability to run any arbitrary code we damn well want on it. But thinking about what average users do with their computers, a full blown computer is a serious waste of money. They check email, check Facebook, watch a bit of YouTube and maybe listen to some MP3s. All of which can be done perfectly well on a cheaper iOS (or Android, for that matter) device - and with less stuff to 'go wrong' (badly configured software, viruses, dodgy device drivers etc.) Not to mention it consumes very little power, 'boots' instantly, and doesn't really need constant patching (although admittedly iOS/app updates are relatively frequent).
I can think of several people in my family (my parents and parents-in-law, and a few of my cousins too) that do nothing else with a computer than these things, ever. In fact I strongly recommended my mother just get an iPad recently instead of spending thousands upgrading to whatever random assemblage of lowest-bidder hardware Dell or HP is putting together these days.
Ah nice - I was wondering if any of the US ISPs were doing this yet.
My (ordinary, residential) ISP is also fully native IPv6 to the home (and has been for about a year I think, though I only just got a native-IPv6-capable router in the last few months). I live in the Asia-Pacific RIR (APNIC) area though (Australia) so I think IPv6 deployment here is probably somewhat ahead of in North America, simply because we are due to run out of IPv4 addresses quicker than all the other regions. Several major national ISPs here have already got native IPv6 trials running.
Hehe... comcast6.net even mentions to me that I'm connecting via IPv6. How nice of it.
It's most likely a tunnel... easy to find out: just find out what your IPv6 address appears to be and do some Googling. Teredo and 6to4 have distinct prefixes that are reserved for those uses, I believe.
No thanks. While that suits many average users, I would change ISPs if they did that to me. (NB. both my home ISP and my mobile phone have proper public IPs at this stage, and in fact my home connection is full native IPv6/v4 dual stack already, though I do understand that's a rarity for a residential ISP)
You're completely right though, of course. I foresee an awful period of horrible double-NATtedness for most home connections in the not too distant future.
Pinging www.v6.facebook.com [2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3: time=170ms Reply from 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3: time=169ms Reply from 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3: time=170ms Reply from 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3: time=170ms
Ping statistics for 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 169ms, Maximum = 170ms, Average = 169ms
On 'World IPv6 Day', they'll be making their main site (i.e. www.facebook.com) IPv6-enabled. That's really what the point of this day is... not to test IPv6 itself, but to iron out bugs that might occur when major sites go to dual-stack on their main sites (both on their end, and the users' end).
Consumer routers that I know of that support IPv6:
- any mid-high end Billion (one of the most common brands in Asia/Pacific) - Apple Airport Extreme (not very common admittedly) - most AVN ones (very common in Europe) - anything flashable with OpenWRT or DD-WRT (this covers a lot of common North American ones) [not sure if this is native IPv6 or just brokered, but either way...]
Last two routers I've owned have been a Billion 7404VNPX (a few years old but got IPv6 in a firmware update earlier this year) and a AVM FritzBox 7390 (which had it out of the box). So they are out there... it's just a matter of knowing which ones have it.
I knew someone would pick me up on that. I am aware of the Verizon CDMA iPhone but I wasn't including that since the whole conversation was about GSM, and the CDMA iPhone is a bit of an oddity and only sold in one market globally. "Completely identical in what bands they support" should have really read "completely identical in what GSM bands they support, if a GSM phone".
Interesting that it's actually a dual mode chip with the GSM disabled. Does make sense though from a manufacturing perspective if from the iPhone 5 onwards they can just make a single model though. Might also open up some interesting roaming opportunities (GSM at home, but roam on CDMA in the US - that'd be nice since by and large the CDMA networks in the US have better coverage than the GSM ones).
Not that you can ever generalise about any brand of SSD or HDD, but OCZ is fairly well known as making the less-reliable (but damn fast) drives. Halfway up the scale are Corsair, Crucial, Mushkin etc. who make drives that are a little slower on paper than the OCZ (but still stupidly fast, really) but are a fraction more reliable. At the top you have Intel who easily have the most reliable SSDs by far, but they'll cost you.
YMMV I guess. Last hard drive that failed on me was a mechanical drive and it literally just died instantly. Was working fine one minute, then my PC freezes up for 20 seconds... followed by a bluescreen. Reboot, and uhoh, no boot record. Data recovery software showed a bunch of bad sectors, conveniently located right in the middle of the master file table! It said it could recover files for me... and according to it, it 'succeeded' at doing that - but all the files it extracted and wrote to the good medium were scrambled to hell. (i.e. MP3s that weren't seen as valid MP3s, executables that wouldn't run). Even a low level format/zero-fill of the drive would fail.
Yet, despite all this, smartmontools would continue to report everything was A-OK with the drive;) No indication of failure at all.
The replacement drive I bought is an SSD, so we'll see how this one fares in the long term...:)
Just got my first SSD (Corsair Force F115) two weeks ago. Remind me about this thread in 3 years and I'll tell you if it's still alive;) Given that the drive it is replacing was a mechanical HDD which only lasted 3.5 years, the way I see it, if it equals or beats that I'm happy with it (especially considering in 3 years time I'll be able to get a far larger and faster SSD for the same price).
Reliability is a concern for most computer users who are less than fastidious about their backups. People like my sister or parents who aren't very tech-savvy. For me though it's not too much of a biggie (apart from the irritation of having to drive to the store, RMA the drive and get a replacement). I used Clonezilla to make a full drive image of my fully installed and updated OS with the settings the way I like them. So it's really just: install new HDD (10 mins), restore image to it (another 10 mins), and reinstall bits of software on an ongoing basis as I require them.
Cause it's an avation story and feet is pretty much the global standard (for better or worse).
I'm in a metric country (Australia) and I think in metric for everything. In fact I barely know what most imperial/US measurements even are. This normally includes altitude - I think in metres for altitude above sea level on land (i.e. I know my house is 576m above sea level, and the summit of a nearby mountain is at 880m). When hiking I have a pretty good feel for how far I have ascended or decended, in metres. Etc.
But for aviation purposes I would still talk about feet, nonetheless, because thats what pilots and aircraft instrumentation use worldwide. The thing is... I can't really ~visualise~ how far x feet is like I can do for metres. I just know the ceilings of various aircraft in feet, and that my flights to and from the US generally top out at 39,000 ft etc. But I have no gut feel as to how high that is (whereas I can visualise, say, 10km altitude much better).
Sorry but I take my smartphone with me on holidays ~because I enjoy it~. Work doesn't call me. But I sure do like to be able to get emails from my family, search for nearby restaurants in foreign countries, check directions using GPS while driving on unfamiliar streets, play games on it to pass the time while sitting on planes or trains, etc etc. Not all of us use a smartphone exclusively for work.
They are CDMA/EVDO, not GSM. That rules them out for anyone bringing a phone from outside the US, where CDMA is unheard of.*
(* Yes I know there are ~some~ CDMA networks outside of the US... Korea and China spring to mind... but the vast majority of the world is GSM/UMTS/HSDPA-only).
You have it backwards. ATT uses 'standard' 3G frequencies (i.e. frequencies that are used by at least some other countries/providers). T-Mobile is the weird one, using the 1700 Mhz UMTS band that I don't think is used by any other provider on earth. Virtually no 3GSM/UMTS/HSDPA phones support this band, other than ones specifically manufactured for, and sold by, T-Mobile USA.
The iPhone 4 will work fine on ATT (after all, ATT is ~the~ GSM iPhone carrier in the US). However, their prepaid options are... expensive and annoying to setup compared to the process of getting a temporary SIM almost anywhere else in the world. T-Mobile has better prepaid options but you'll obviously only get EDGE data rather than 3G/HSDPA (due to their 3G bands being 'weird').
Having said that, I'd still go for T-Mobile. I do it quite regularly (using my Australian iPhone 4, visiting the US). The prepaid plans are cheaper, and the EDGE data rates are still adequate for basic email and the occasional webpage or two. If you're a bit patient it's OK for maps too - though what I would do if I were you would be to grab an app that allows you to pre-cache maps so that they loaded quickly and didn't consume data. MotionX GPS is a good one - only a few bucks and allows you to download and store maps of any arbitrarily sized areas you choose in advance.
Oh and BTW all iPhone 4s are completely identical in terms of what bands they support. It's a single model worldwide. The only difference is the US ones are network-locked to ATT (which has nothing to do with frequency support).
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On a smartphone though, the threat isn't that the thief will get your phone and rack up a bill. It's that they can get all your personal data. Contacts, usernames for any sites/services you use on the phone, etc.
Worse: most people have their mail application set to remember password. So they can read all your mail, or send mail pretending to be you. Similarly with apps like Facebook - these are generally left logged in/password remembered. So even if your various passwords are long and difficult to guess, this is moot if they protected only via a 4 digit number on the phone.
It depends what kind of game you prefer:
Minecraft concentrates on the creationism/building. There's no end-game goals, there's not much in the way of RPG/adventure elements (yet) - it's basically virtual Lego. I like that and I'm still playing it obsessively (big projects take months or years to build unless you hack, so I can see myself playing it for a while yet).
Terraria focuses more on the exploration/gear/adventure elements and less on building. It has a far greater array of droppable/craftable/mineable items and a more complex gear/stats system. But you can't really build anything amazing in it like Minecraft (since it's 2D). There's also some identifiable 'end game' goals which MC doesn't really have, and the world is finite etc.
They are superficially similar games, but in reality, made for two different types of gamer. If you prefer adventurey spelunking elements without having to just sit there mining huge amounts of resources to build stuff, Terraria is great. If you don't really care too much for hacking monsters up and finding items, but just want to build some awesome structures, Minecraft.
I like both TBH, but I think Minecraft will have more long-term appeal.
Nah not really. It's still thought of as google.com to most people, even though they are using the local variant 99 times out of 100.
For me I just type "google" in the bar. The browser adds 'www.' and '.com'. And then, Google redirects me to the local (Australian) version www.google.com.au
Though there is a link right below the search bar to "go to Google.com" (which takes you to the main site). I rarely use it though unless I'm specifically looking for results ~not~ about my local area (e.g. researching travel information in other countries).
To be honest, as a native English speaker who has spoken with many Dutch people online (I was in a predominantly Dutch guild in an MMO for many years and spent a lot of time on Ventrilo), their English is by and large excellent. Better than most idiots here seem to be capable of.
Yep that's pretty good.
You even beat (not by much, mind you) my own country (Australia), which is already considered to have fairly low violent crime statistics by world standards. Murders here are between 260 and 290 per year here over the last decade (for a population of ~22 million).
Wiki has a decent table comparing countries by murder rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate - most recent stats are 1.3 per 100,000 in Australia compared to 0.93 per 100,000 in the Netherlands.
Interestingly, France and the UK are almost exactly the same as Australia, around 1.3/100,000. So although Paris or London themselves might be more dangerous, that doesn't seem to translate to the entire country. The US' statistic is also surprising: 5.0 per 100,000 - the highest among OECD countries by a long shot (though still comparatively safe compared to the majority of countries in the world). Finland also caught my eye as being unusual: 2.8/100,000 - considerably higher than all the other northern European countries that surround it, for some odd reason.
Stats are interesting...
Ah interesting ... thanks for the info.
Yeah I have thought about turning off IPv4 and going IPv6 only just for kicks (i.e. to be amazed at how few sites I can access, and how badly broken the ones I can access are). But I never got around to it. Sounds like I'm not missing out on much.
The last 64 bits of the address can be whatever you want, as the entire /64 space is allocated to you. So it can't really be a land-grab ... it's only the ~first~ 64 bits of the address that are unique and assignable.
Yes ... no problems at all here (I have a native IPv6 connection, not tunnelled). This isn't really very surprising - these sites have mostly been resolvable and accessible via IPv6 for a long time through alternate domains (e.g. ipv6.google.com, www.v6.facebook.com). All that changed is that they have now published AAAA records for the ~main~ domains as well.
You can't get much that you'd actually ~want~ to use for under about $700-800 where I live. But yes that's still not "thousands".
But no, the reason that I said that was that my parents always just buy the most expensive "x" they can find when they need to buy an "x". They don't understand PCs, but they reason that the most expensive one must be better, so go for that one. They do the same for everything else: TVs, stereo systems, toasters, washing machines, you name it ;)
Put it this way, the last machine they bought was a Dell. They just went onto the Dell website and maxed out most of the options and ended up with a $4000 machine. I /facepalmed a little at the time, but in retrospect it probably wasn't a bad purchase given that it lasted over 6 years for them (and frankly, still runs quite well for basic tasks).
You ~can~ get computers that cheap in some areas (particularly the US). They aren't quite as cheap in the country I live in, though the most basic models Dell sells aren't much more - starting at ~$650 USD. Given that a 16 GB WiFi-only iPad is $400-and-something, though, I'd still recommend the latter over the former for some users.
BUT, I tell you, I've used a few of the entry level HPs and Dells and Acers etc. in my time and they are utterly awful. Horrible, horrible machines, loaded with crapware that slows them down to a crawl (which yes, can be remedied but we are talking about novice users here remember) and using incredibly cheap parts that simply won't last as long as a decent $1500+ computer that a slashdotter would build themselves using decent quality parts that they've hand-picked after careful consideration and plenty of review reading. Meanwhile the iPad has excellent build quality, and the scope of things that can go wrong with it is smaller. And it's cheaper than the entry level PCs (netbooks compete on price with it, but cheap netbooks are just as bad as cheap PCs).
That's where I was coming from in my post.
I think that's probably spot on.
Think about it. Users like you and I want, and will always want, a 'real computer' with a real OS and the ability to run any arbitrary code we damn well want on it. But thinking about what average users do with their computers, a full blown computer is a serious waste of money. They check email, check Facebook, watch a bit of YouTube and maybe listen to some MP3s. All of which can be done perfectly well on a cheaper iOS (or Android, for that matter) device - and with less stuff to 'go wrong' (badly configured software, viruses, dodgy device drivers etc.) Not to mention it consumes very little power, 'boots' instantly, and doesn't really need constant patching (although admittedly iOS/app updates are relatively frequent).
I can think of several people in my family (my parents and parents-in-law, and a few of my cousins too) that do nothing else with a computer than these things, ever. In fact I strongly recommended my mother just get an iPad recently instead of spending thousands upgrading to whatever random assemblage of lowest-bidder hardware Dell or HP is putting together these days.
Ah nice - I was wondering if any of the US ISPs were doing this yet.
My (ordinary, residential) ISP is also fully native IPv6 to the home (and has been for about a year I think, though I only just got a native-IPv6-capable router in the last few months). I live in the Asia-Pacific RIR (APNIC) area though (Australia) so I think IPv6 deployment here is probably somewhat ahead of in North America, simply because we are due to run out of IPv4 addresses quicker than all the other regions. Several major national ISPs here have already got native IPv6 trials running.
Hehe ... comcast6.net even mentions to me that I'm connecting via IPv6. How nice of it.
It's most likely a tunnel ... easy to find out: just find out what your IPv6 address appears to be and do some Googling. Teredo and 6to4 have distinct prefixes that are reserved for those uses, I believe.
No thanks. While that suits many average users, I would change ISPs if they did that to me. (NB. both my home ISP and my mobile phone have proper public IPs at this stage, and in fact my home connection is full native IPv6/v4 dual stack already, though I do understand that's a rarity for a residential ISP)
You're completely right though, of course. I foresee an awful period of horrible double-NATtedness for most home connections in the not too distant future.
Facebook does, actually, at http://www.v6.facebook.com./
> ping www.v6.facebook.com
Pinging www.v6.facebook.com [2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3: time=170ms
Reply from 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3: time=169ms
Reply from 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3: time=170ms
Reply from 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3: time=170ms
Ping statistics for 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 169ms, Maximum = 170ms, Average = 169ms
On 'World IPv6 Day', they'll be making their main site (i.e. www.facebook.com) IPv6-enabled. That's really what the point of this day is ... not to test IPv6 itself, but to iron out bugs that might occur when major sites go to dual-stack on their main sites (both on their end, and the users' end).
Consumer routers that I know of that support IPv6:
- any mid-high end Billion (one of the most common brands in Asia/Pacific)
- Apple Airport Extreme (not very common admittedly)
- most AVN ones (very common in Europe)
- anything flashable with OpenWRT or DD-WRT (this covers a lot of common North American ones) [not sure if this is native IPv6 or just brokered, but either way...]
Last two routers I've owned have been a Billion 7404VNPX (a few years old but got IPv6 in a firmware update earlier this year) and a AVM FritzBox 7390 (which had it out of the box). So they are out there ... it's just a matter of knowing which ones have it.
I knew someone would pick me up on that. I am aware of the Verizon CDMA iPhone but I wasn't including that since the whole conversation was about GSM, and the CDMA iPhone is a bit of an oddity and only sold in one market globally. "Completely identical in what bands they support" should have really read "completely identical in what GSM bands they support, if a GSM phone".
Interesting that it's actually a dual mode chip with the GSM disabled. Does make sense though from a manufacturing perspective if from the iPhone 5 onwards they can just make a single model though. Might also open up some interesting roaming opportunities (GSM at home, but roam on CDMA in the US - that'd be nice since by and large the CDMA networks in the US have better coverage than the GSM ones).
Not that you can ever generalise about any brand of SSD or HDD, but OCZ is fairly well known as making the less-reliable (but damn fast) drives. Halfway up the scale are Corsair, Crucial, Mushkin etc. who make drives that are a little slower on paper than the OCZ (but still stupidly fast, really) but are a fraction more reliable. At the top you have Intel who easily have the most reliable SSDs by far, but they'll cost you.
YMMV I guess. Last hard drive that failed on me was a mechanical drive and it literally just died instantly. Was working fine one minute, then my PC freezes up for 20 seconds ... followed by a bluescreen. Reboot, and uhoh, no boot record. Data recovery software showed a bunch of bad sectors, conveniently located right in the middle of the master file table! It said it could recover files for me ... and according to it, it 'succeeded' at doing that - but all the files it extracted and wrote to the good medium were scrambled to hell. (i.e. MP3s that weren't seen as valid MP3s, executables that wouldn't run). Even a low level format/zero-fill of the drive would fail.
Yet, despite all this, smartmontools would continue to report everything was A-OK with the drive ;) No indication of failure at all.
The replacement drive I bought is an SSD, so we'll see how this one fares in the long term... :)
Just got my first SSD (Corsair Force F115) two weeks ago. Remind me about this thread in 3 years and I'll tell you if it's still alive ;) Given that the drive it is replacing was a mechanical HDD which only lasted 3.5 years, the way I see it, if it equals or beats that I'm happy with it (especially considering in 3 years time I'll be able to get a far larger and faster SSD for the same price).
Reliability is a concern for most computer users who are less than fastidious about their backups. People like my sister or parents who aren't very tech-savvy. For me though it's not too much of a biggie (apart from the irritation of having to drive to the store, RMA the drive and get a replacement). I used Clonezilla to make a full drive image of my fully installed and updated OS with the settings the way I like them. So it's really just: install new HDD (10 mins), restore image to it (another 10 mins), and reinstall bits of software on an ongoing basis as I require them.
Cause it's an avation story and feet is pretty much the global standard (for better or worse).
I'm in a metric country (Australia) and I think in metric for everything. In fact I barely know what most imperial/US measurements even are. This normally includes altitude - I think in metres for altitude above sea level on land (i.e. I know my house is 576m above sea level, and the summit of a nearby mountain is at 880m). When hiking I have a pretty good feel for how far I have ascended or decended, in metres. Etc.
But for aviation purposes I would still talk about feet, nonetheless, because thats what pilots and aircraft instrumentation use worldwide. The thing is ... I can't really ~visualise~ how far x feet is like I can do for metres. I just know the ceilings of various aircraft in feet, and that my flights to and from the US generally top out at 39,000 ft etc. But I have no gut feel as to how high that is (whereas I can visualise, say, 10km altitude much better).
It'll go even further than Tokyo using that kayak route if you let it. For instance, try New York to Sydney, Australia :)
Sorry but I take my smartphone with me on holidays ~because I enjoy it~. Work doesn't call me. But I sure do like to be able to get emails from my family, search for nearby restaurants in foreign countries, check directions using GPS while driving on unfamiliar streets, play games on it to pass the time while sitting on planes or trains, etc etc. Not all of us use a smartphone exclusively for work.
Er...
They are CDMA/EVDO, not GSM. That rules them out for anyone bringing a phone from outside the US, where CDMA is unheard of.*
(* Yes I know there are ~some~ CDMA networks outside of the US ... Korea and China spring to mind ... but the vast majority of the world is GSM/UMTS/HSDPA-only).
You have it backwards. ATT uses 'standard' 3G frequencies (i.e. frequencies that are used by at least some other countries/providers). T-Mobile is the weird one, using the 1700 Mhz UMTS band that I don't think is used by any other provider on earth. Virtually no 3GSM/UMTS/HSDPA phones support this band, other than ones specifically manufactured for, and sold by, T-Mobile USA.
The iPhone 4 will work fine on ATT (after all, ATT is ~the~ GSM iPhone carrier in the US). However, their prepaid options are ... expensive and annoying to setup compared to the process of getting a temporary SIM almost anywhere else in the world. T-Mobile has better prepaid options but you'll obviously only get EDGE data rather than 3G/HSDPA (due to their 3G bands being 'weird').
Having said that, I'd still go for T-Mobile. I do it quite regularly (using my Australian iPhone 4, visiting the US). The prepaid plans are cheaper, and the EDGE data rates are still adequate for basic email and the occasional webpage or two. If you're a bit patient it's OK for maps too - though what I would do if I were you would be to grab an app that allows you to pre-cache maps so that they loaded quickly and didn't consume data. MotionX GPS is a good one - only a few bucks and allows you to download and store maps of any arbitrarily sized areas you choose in advance.
Oh and BTW all iPhone 4s are completely identical in terms of what bands they support. It's a single model worldwide. The only difference is the US ones are network-locked to ATT (which has nothing to do with frequency support).