What if you know that what you're doing is morally, ethically and socially reprehensible, has no sane explanation, gives you no pleasure, has no religious reasoning and you're merely doing it to prove a point. Like... a white, middle aged family man, wife, three kids, independently wealthy, agnostic, no run-ins with the law, got along splendidly with his parents and siblings who goes and blows up a school bus full of children, a kinder garden, nursery, retirement home, ER, a stock brokerage office, a bank, the local town hall and an airport check-in area. Merely to see if he could get away with it.
So you have no problem with your kids watching a dozen planets and billions of people being annihilated in a nuclear holocaust, people being left behind to die of radiation sickness, starvation and the like, people being executed, committing suicide - but don't nobody go killing babies?
The baby killing scene builds tension the best way possible - showing us that the Cylons had no issue with killing off the weak and innocent. She's even musing about the baby's weakness as she does it. That's why it is so effective - it tells us that there is no negotiating with them, tells us that they have no compassion and that we'd be better off hoping that the group of hungry lions don't eat the baby gazelle.
But back to my original point - why is it that you feel your kids can enjoy watching billions of people being killed, but you can't allow them to watch a single one being killed? Why is it that you feel that your kids can enjoy watching an episode like 33, where humans themselves kill a ship with a significant amount of the survivors of the attacks (I think 1,300 vs 45,000), but the sound effect of a baby's neck snapping and a mother crying out in anguish is too much?
If the odds of a mega disaster hitting your area are really 500 to 1, then you should have been hit 22 times in the 30 years you've been outsourcing to IBM.
In other words, outsourcing to IBM actually prevents mega disasters.
Imagine for a moment that this becomes a regular part of your ISP charges. You pay 1 cent per email you sent last month. Might seem reasonable.
Then one day your computer is hit by some kind of malware (virus, trojan, worm, whatever) and starts sending one spam email per second, fully authenticated and with a centmail stamp on it.
It does this on the first day of the fiscal month. 1 mail per second isn't all that much extra traffic, so you probably won't notice. Computer on 4 hours a day, every day, you end up sending 432,000 emails costing $4,320.
Now imagine it hits a company instead. Small office, 10 computer. Now we're talking 8 hours a day x 10 computers, totalling $86,400.
Wouldn't it be possible to set up encryption in such a way that all machines and all data requires something like an RSA token to access?
Have to company owner order the tokens and sent to him. That way there won't be a way for the administrators to surreptitiously keep one for themselves bla bla bla.
Granted, you'd still have to trust them to set the software up properly, but shouldn't this reduce the likelihood of data theft? Or at least what the thieves can get access to?
I thought they had real strict gun laws and a blanket ban on civilian ownership of handguns? How can they have gun crime???
I thought they had laws on speeding? How can they have traffic violations??? I thought they had real strict laws on child molestation and a blanket ban on registered sex offenders living near schools? How can they have child molesters???
For some strange reason, having a law on something doesn't prevent that thing from happening - it merely makes it illegal. I think that's why we have jails as well.
It's been more than a decade since I took the test and even used the knowledge, so pardon me for not remembering everything including the full numbers used. I merely picked 10^-8 because that'd trip you up when using the simple formula and not the general one.
But we're talking about a high school level test. These always assume theoretical perfect conditions.
And again, it was a 3% question - the point wasn't that no one had heard of weak acids and the equilibrium equation, it was that almost everyone assumed that HCl is a strong acid (correct but useless in this concentration) and that they simply ignored the simple fact that an acid will not have a pH of >7.
That build on what the first poster's daughter said - the grader might not know that she's giving the correct answer.
I had high level chemistry in high school as an elected subject. Our teacher was quite adamant about drilling us with critical thinking to our own answers - i.e. does this answer make sense.
The reason being that sometimes your formulas give you an answer that just doesn't make sense, allowing you to give the correct answer.
Then at the final exam, one of the 3% questions (very easy) was something like this: "Give the pH level for a 10^(-8) molar solution of HCl"
Just using the formula -log(10^(-8) gives you 8, so that's obviously the answer, and according to our teacher that was the answer given by 85% of students country wide.
Of course, this question is a trick question, because HCl is an acid, and acids have a pH value of less than 7. In this case, the HCl will be overpowered by the natural buffering effect of water, and water has a pH value of 7, making that the correct answer.
There was only one school in the country, where all the students got that particular answer right. Made our teacher proud, but also rather disappointed in the other schools.
I know what you meant by "some". But do you really honestly believe, that there are more rapists and child molesters than the others? And keep in mind, that a 17-year-old having consensual sex with a 15-year-old is likely to label them as rapist, or that if mom and dad are okay with you having sex with your boy-/girlfriend, then they're also child molesters.
My point was that the actual dangerous sex offenders (the predators) are far far in the minority, whereas very few of the people labelled as murderers are guilty of assisted suicide. Not even people who kill people due to drunk drivers are labelled as murderers, yet two 15-year-olds sending nude pictures to each other are at risk of being labelled sex offenders.
To summarize, I was pointing out that you phrased your statement in such a way, that the sex offenders seem much more dangerous than the murderers.
One is "why are sex offenders treated worse than murderers". The answer is because *some* types of sex offenders have an extremely high recidivism rate. They're very likely to commit repeat offenses, while *most* murderers are not.
Let me rephrase that for you without changing the outcome of the statement:
*some* types of murderers have an extremely high recidivism rate. They're very likely to commit repeat offenses, while *most* sex offenders are not.
All you did was frame your non-answer in way that made it seem like the sex offenders were worse.
Try this one on for size: Some types of numbers are prime, while most are not Most types of numbers are not prime, while some are
I think if I was affected by one of these laws for something completely ridiculous like public urination or having had sex with my 15-year-old girlfriend when I was 15 myself, I'd make myself a bunch crude cloth yellow stars, write public urination/consensual sex etc. on them and sew them onto my clothes. Might even make sure that all of my clothes were in that worn grey colour with the wide worn blue vertical stripes on them. And I'd need the hat as well.
While this might be a bit crude, it's pretty much the only one of the symbols, that the Nazis used to target their 5th rate population with, that people remember.
Now, this would no doubt piss off a lot of people in public, so I'd be sure to keep a large pile of flyers with me, describing not only the Nazi concentration camp badges but also what I've actually done (like taking a leak on a police car or something). Hell, I'm an atheist, but I'd convert to Judaism just to make the point.
These days the only way to get your message across is if you repeatedly kick people in the groin until they stop yelling and start listening. This is a consequence of living in the 20 second century. If you can't make your point in less than 20 seconds, no one will listen. And I'm fairly certain that this kind of outfit would ensure me their attention for more than 20 seconds.
[...] rape that involves no weapon or fighting is just not something I would call "violent."
Here's a thought. You've been in an accident and you are now paralysed from the neck down, but you can feel everything that happens to your body.
Someone decides that you look cute enough to have sex with, and since you're in no position to fight back you won't mind of course. It's not like you'd be raped. Sure, you could always scream, but for the sake of argument, let's pretend the accident has also left you mute.
Are you seriously going to suggest, that this kind of person cannot be violently raped? What if the perpetrator manages to tear your sphincter? If you're unfortunate, there's nothing stopping you from bleeding out or suffering from blood poisoning and dying from it. Is it still not a violent crime?
Violence isn't the same as beating someone over the head. Violence is using force to achieve something. Sometimes it's called for (boxing and slaughter comes to mind), sometimes it isn't. But it's still violence.
I'm not sure what search you mean is defaulted to true. I haven't changed anything from the Firefox default settings. It only prepends www to that attempt, and it doesn't use any search engine as a third option.
For example, roughly a third of the global energy budget is consumed through the internal combustion engine which is something like 20% efficient at best.
True, but it would be more correct to say that it is spent on transportation. And even then, the ICE is 20 times as efficient as that process in cement production.
I don't know about you, but personally I wouldn't choose something that is 20 times more effective as an example of how something else isn't remarkably efficient. Imagine how horribly bulky cars and trucks would be, if their engines had to be 20 times the size, just to get the same effect? A midrange family car produces about 100 BHP, gets decent milage and can easily carry four people while being fairly safe at highway speeds. Now substitute the engine with a 5 BHP engine but keep the weight the same, and you get an idea of what the difference is between the efficiency of the ICE and grinding clinker.
Yes, ICEs are somewhat wasteful, and I don't think we'll see any kind of further improvements on them without regulation, but holding it up next to grinding clinker as an example of something equally inefficient?
One of my dorm friends, Jakob Husum, wrote his dissertation on ways of optimizing cement productions.
One of the rather impressive/scary things about that, is that it is responsible for about 2% of the world's energy consumption. That's an insane amount of energy for something that isn't even an end product.
The first paragraph of the paper actually grabs you by the balls and twists firmly:
Production of cement is one of the most energy intensive industrial processes, consuming up to 2 % of the worlds electricity due to several low eciency processes. The grinding of cement clinker from the kiln is the most inefficient process in the manufacturing, with an efficiency of 1 % (Benzer et al., 2001).
Can't quite remember how much of the energy if spent on the last bit, but I think it was something like 25%. That's 0.5% of the world's energy usage spent on a 1% efficient process. Now imagine you could up the efficiency to 10% or even 5%. That'd be a reduction of the world's energy usage of 0.45 or 0.4% respectively, simply by improving a single process.
Now, there are a lot of arguments for saving energy. Saving the environment, less pollution etc., but it's hard to overlook the economic incentive of cutting back energy costs of a production, where a large part of the process is 1% efficient.
DNS error - cannot find server Oops! This link appears to be broken.
Firefox 3.5.2 gives me
Server not found Firefox can't find the server at www.3.se.
Safari gives me
Safari can't find the server. Safari can't open the page "http://3.se/" because Safari can't find the server "3.se".
In other words, unless you messed up your Firefox install, nothing on Windows 7 makes Firefox (or any other browser) use Bing as a search engine unless you've asked it to. The only reason IE8 even uses Google as the search engine is because I asked it to when I set it up.
None of the browsers have this issue. They all try to resolve http://3.se/ and http://www.3.se/ but like I said, that domain cannot ever exist as a legitimate domain, so it fails. All the browsers are doing what they've been told to do.
The only thing I can think of, that you may have done to make your Firefox installation use Bing for the searches, is if you asked it to import settings from another browser (IE) which used Bing as its search provider. Are you sure the only thing you did was update Windows and not Firefox? Maybe an update would trigger the question again (I haven't a clue, I don't use it)? Or a fresh install or a misclick somewhere in its settings?
a postcard came today saying it would auto-renew [...] if I didn't call to make other plans [...] I was on the phone for a hour
Did you sign for receipt of the letter? If not, you could always claim that the letter wasn't delivered and have the bank cancel the payments.
Better yet, send them a fax saying that unless THEY call YOU, not only will your plan be cancelled (as you intended to do in the first place), but you also get to give their CEO a public caning in the town of your choice.
I don't really see a difference between the two, except you having a receipt from their fax, that they received it.
Secondly, did you have to pay for that hour long call? Did they have the courtesy of calling you back? Granted, if you're in the US, you'd probably be paying either way on a cell phone, right?
Third, why the fuck is it even LEGAL to start charging you for something you explicitly told them you didn't want, and didn't ask to have sent to you again? From what I hear, if they were to send you dvd box sets you hadn't requested, it'd be considered a gift and not something they could then charge you for - how is cable any different? And with cable, it's not like you would have any way of sending the signal back to them.
Btw, I found this bit funny:
its netflix for me, for now on. no remote 'loggers' when I spin a silver disc!
I suspect Netflix might be keeping track of what you've rented in the past. Granted, it doesn't tell them how often you've watched the movie, when you paused and resumed the movie etc., but they probably have a pretty good idea of how long you've kept each movie.
Canada is NOT cheaper than the US for mobile service. RTFA.
I did. The numbers from the article are as follows: Low usage: Canada 195,68 United States 279,52 Canada 30% cheaper.
Medium usage: Canada 500,63 United States 635,85 Canada 21% cheaper
High usage: Canada 563,20 United States 635,85 Canada 11% cheaper
Where I'm from, cheaper means having a lower price than something else, and all three usage groups places Canada at a lower price than the USA.
As for you being raped by your phone company, it boils down to the same answer as everything else - you don't really need it. If you're required to have one for your job, have them pay for everything. It's very nice to have a cell phone, that much is true, but we somehow managed without them back in the 80's, even if you got stuck on the side of the road. Sure, it'd suck if it was in a blizzard or desert or the like, but then again, it might as well be in an area without coverage - then you're equally screwed unless you happen to have a satellite phone, and I suspect they're even more expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I thought about Hicksville, but I always thought it'd be in Alabama.
Racism is in the eye of the beholder - and in the narrator.
Jon Stewart made a great comment when Obama visited Saudi Arabia:
Don't receive the first black president of the United States while you're wearing a white robe and hood
And don't be giving him no bling bling!
What if you know that what you're doing is morally, ethically and socially reprehensible, has no sane explanation, gives you no pleasure, has no religious reasoning and you're merely doing it to prove a point. Like ... a white, middle aged family man, wife, three kids, independently wealthy, agnostic, no run-ins with the law, got along splendidly with his parents and siblings who goes and blows up a school bus full of children, a kinder garden, nursery, retirement home, ER, a stock brokerage office, a bank, the local town hall and an airport check-in area. Merely to see if he could get away with it.
Would that not be an evil act?
So you have no problem with your kids watching a dozen planets and billions of people being annihilated in a nuclear holocaust, people being left behind to die of radiation sickness, starvation and the like, people being executed, committing suicide - but don't nobody go killing babies?
The baby killing scene builds tension the best way possible - showing us that the Cylons had no issue with killing off the weak and innocent. She's even musing about the baby's weakness as she does it. That's why it is so effective - it tells us that there is no negotiating with them, tells us that they have no compassion and that we'd be better off hoping that the group of hungry lions don't eat the baby gazelle.
But back to my original point - why is it that you feel your kids can enjoy watching billions of people being killed, but you can't allow them to watch a single one being killed? Why is it that you feel that your kids can enjoy watching an episode like 33, where humans themselves kill a ship with a significant amount of the survivors of the attacks (I think 1,300 vs 45,000), but the sound effect of a baby's neck snapping and a mother crying out in anguish is too much?
If the odds of a mega disaster hitting your area are really 500 to 1, then you should have been hit 22 times in the 30 years you've been outsourcing to IBM.
In other words, outsourcing to IBM actually prevents mega disasters.
Imagine for a moment that this becomes a regular part of your ISP charges. You pay 1 cent per email you sent last month. Might seem reasonable.
Then one day your computer is hit by some kind of malware (virus, trojan, worm, whatever) and starts sending one spam email per second, fully authenticated and with a centmail stamp on it.
It does this on the first day of the fiscal month. 1 mail per second isn't all that much extra traffic, so you probably won't notice. Computer on 4 hours a day, every day, you end up sending 432,000 emails costing $4,320.
Now imagine it hits a company instead. Small office, 10 computer. Now we're talking 8 hours a day x 10 computers, totalling $86,400.
Yeah - I can't wait.
Wouldn't it be possible to set up encryption in such a way that all machines and all data requires something like an RSA token to access?
Have to company owner order the tokens and sent to him. That way there won't be a way for the administrators to surreptitiously keep one for themselves bla bla bla.
Granted, you'd still have to trust them to set the software up properly, but shouldn't this reduce the likelihood of data theft? Or at least what the thieves can get access to?
You can't tell a story like that and just leave out the stupid questions.
I thought they had laws on speeding? How can they have traffic violations???
I thought they had real strict laws on child molestation and a blanket ban on registered sex offenders living near schools? How can they have child molesters???
For some strange reason, having a law on something doesn't prevent that thing from happening - it merely makes it illegal. I think that's why we have jails as well.
It's been more than a decade since I took the test and even used the knowledge, so pardon me for not remembering everything including the full numbers used. I merely picked 10^-8 because that'd trip you up when using the simple formula and not the general one.
But we're talking about a high school level test. These always assume theoretical perfect conditions.
And again, it was a 3% question - the point wasn't that no one had heard of weak acids and the equilibrium equation, it was that almost everyone assumed that HCl is a strong acid (correct but useless in this concentration) and that they simply ignored the simple fact that an acid will not have a pH of >7.
That build on what the first poster's daughter said - the grader might not know that she's giving the correct answer.
But it felt soooo right ...
I had high level chemistry in high school as an elected subject. Our teacher was quite adamant about drilling us with critical thinking to our own answers - i.e. does this answer make sense.
The reason being that sometimes your formulas give you an answer that just doesn't make sense, allowing you to give the correct answer.
Then at the final exam, one of the 3% questions (very easy) was something like this:
"Give the pH level for a 10^(-8) molar solution of HCl"
Just using the formula -log(10^(-8) gives you 8, so that's obviously the answer, and according to our teacher that was the answer given by 85% of students country wide.
Of course, this question is a trick question, because HCl is an acid, and acids have a pH value of less than 7. In this case, the HCl will be overpowered by the natural buffering effect of water, and water has a pH value of 7, making that the correct answer.
There was only one school in the country, where all the students got that particular answer right. Made our teacher proud, but also rather disappointed in the other schools.
I so hope you don't mean in a catholic church kind of way ... ;)
I know what you meant by "some". But do you really honestly believe, that there are more rapists and child molesters than the others? And keep in mind, that a 17-year-old having consensual sex with a 15-year-old is likely to label them as rapist, or that if mom and dad are okay with you having sex with your boy-/girlfriend, then they're also child molesters.
My point was that the actual dangerous sex offenders (the predators) are far far in the minority, whereas very few of the people labelled as murderers are guilty of assisted suicide. Not even people who kill people due to drunk drivers are labelled as murderers, yet two 15-year-olds sending nude pictures to each other are at risk of being labelled sex offenders.
To summarize, I was pointing out that you phrased your statement in such a way, that the sex offenders seem much more dangerous than the murderers.
Let me rephrase that for you without changing the outcome of the statement:
*some* types of murderers have an extremely high recidivism rate. They're very likely to commit repeat offenses, while *most* sex offenders are not.
All you did was frame your non-answer in way that made it seem like the sex offenders were worse.
Try this one on for size:
Some types of numbers are prime, while most are not
Most types of numbers are not prime, while some are
I think if I was affected by one of these laws for something completely ridiculous like public urination or having had sex with my 15-year-old girlfriend when I was 15 myself, I'd make myself a bunch crude cloth yellow stars, write public urination/consensual sex etc. on them and sew them onto my clothes. Might even make sure that all of my clothes were in that worn grey colour with the wide worn blue vertical stripes on them. And I'd need the hat as well.
While this might be a bit crude, it's pretty much the only one of the symbols, that the Nazis used to target their 5th rate population with, that people remember.
Now, this would no doubt piss off a lot of people in public, so I'd be sure to keep a large pile of flyers with me, describing not only the Nazi concentration camp badges but also what I've actually done (like taking a leak on a police car or something). Hell, I'm an atheist, but I'd convert to Judaism just to make the point.
These days the only way to get your message across is if you repeatedly kick people in the groin until they stop yelling and start listening. This is a consequence of living in the 20 second century. If you can't make your point in less than 20 seconds, no one will listen. And I'm fairly certain that this kind of outfit would ensure me their attention for more than 20 seconds.
Here's a thought. You've been in an accident and you are now paralysed from the neck down, but you can feel everything that happens to your body.
Someone decides that you look cute enough to have sex with, and since you're in no position to fight back you won't mind of course. It's not like you'd be raped. Sure, you could always scream, but for the sake of argument, let's pretend the accident has also left you mute.
Are you seriously going to suggest, that this kind of person cannot be violently raped? What if the perpetrator manages to tear your sphincter? If you're unfortunate, there's nothing stopping you from bleeding out or suffering from blood poisoning and dying from it. Is it still not a violent crime?
Violence isn't the same as beating someone over the head. Violence is using force to achieve something. Sometimes it's called for (boxing and slaughter comes to mind), sometimes it isn't. But it's still violence.
Because if something goes wrong in the USA, the airplanes in question will be landing on US citizens and not Iraqi ones.
I'm not sure what search you mean is defaulted to true. I haven't changed anything from the Firefox default settings. It only prepends www to that attempt, and it doesn't use any search engine as a third option.
That gives me an interesting thought. Will this be able to remove simple wrinkles in people's skin?
I.e. you scan a picture of your grandmother, and all her wrinkles disappear?
True, but it would be more correct to say that it is spent on transportation. And even then, the ICE is 20 times as efficient as that process in cement production.
I don't know about you, but personally I wouldn't choose something that is 20 times more effective as an example of how something else isn't remarkably efficient. Imagine how horribly bulky cars and trucks would be, if their engines had to be 20 times the size, just to get the same effect? A midrange family car produces about 100 BHP, gets decent milage and can easily carry four people while being fairly safe at highway speeds. Now substitute the engine with a 5 BHP engine but keep the weight the same, and you get an idea of what the difference is between the efficiency of the ICE and grinding clinker.
Yes, ICEs are somewhat wasteful, and I don't think we'll see any kind of further improvements on them without regulation, but holding it up next to grinding clinker as an example of something equally inefficient?
One of my dorm friends, Jakob Husum, wrote his dissertation on ways of optimizing cement productions.
One of the rather impressive/scary things about that, is that it is responsible for about 2% of the world's energy consumption. That's an insane amount of energy for something that isn't even an end product.
The first paragraph of the paper actually grabs you by the balls and twists firmly:
Can't quite remember how much of the energy if spent on the last bit, but I think it was something like 25%. That's 0.5% of the world's energy usage spent on a 1% efficient process. Now imagine you could up the efficiency to 10% or even 5%. That'd be a reduction of the world's energy usage of 0.45 or 0.4% respectively, simply by improving a single process.
Now, there are a lot of arguments for saving energy. Saving the environment, less pollution etc., but it's hard to overlook the economic incentive of cutting back energy costs of a production, where a large part of the process is 1% efficient.
Then Firefox is doing something wrong.
I'm using build 7100, Opera, IE8 (version 8.0.7100.0 - no updates available on Windows Update), Chrome (2.0.172.39) and Firefox.
Going to http://3.se (.se domains require a minimum of 3 characters, so this cannot ever resolve) in Opera gives me:
In IE8, Google as default provider gives me http://www.google.com/search?q=3.se&rls=com.microsoft:da&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1 which makes sense, as it's searching for the unresolved domain through Google.
Chrome gives me
Firefox 3.5.2 gives me
Safari gives me
In other words, unless you messed up your Firefox install, nothing on Windows 7 makes Firefox (or any other browser) use Bing as a search engine unless you've asked it to. The only reason IE8 even uses Google as the search engine is because I asked it to when I set it up.
None of the browsers have this issue. They all try to resolve http://3.se/ and http://www.3.se/ but like I said, that domain cannot ever exist as a legitimate domain, so it fails. All the browsers are doing what they've been told to do.
The only thing I can think of, that you may have done to make your Firefox installation use Bing for the searches, is if you asked it to import settings from another browser (IE) which used Bing as its search provider. Are you sure the only thing you did was update Windows and not Firefox? Maybe an update would trigger the question again (I haven't a clue, I don't use it)? Or a fresh install or a misclick somewhere in its settings?
Did you sign for receipt of the letter? If not, you could always claim that the letter wasn't delivered and have the bank cancel the payments.
Better yet, send them a fax saying that unless THEY call YOU, not only will your plan be cancelled (as you intended to do in the first place), but you also get to give their CEO a public caning in the town of your choice.
I don't really see a difference between the two, except you having a receipt from their fax, that they received it.
Secondly, did you have to pay for that hour long call? Did they have the courtesy of calling you back? Granted, if you're in the US, you'd probably be paying either way on a cell phone, right?
Third, why the fuck is it even LEGAL to start charging you for something you explicitly told them you didn't want, and didn't ask to have sent to you again? From what I hear, if they were to send you dvd box sets you hadn't requested, it'd be considered a gift and not something they could then charge you for - how is cable any different? And with cable, it's not like you would have any way of sending the signal back to them.
Btw, I found this bit funny:
I suspect Netflix might be keeping track of what you've rented in the past. Granted, it doesn't tell them how often you've watched the movie, when you paused and resumed the movie etc., but they probably have a pretty good idea of how long you've kept each movie.
I did. The numbers from the article are as follows:
Low usage:
Canada 195,68
United States 279,52
Canada 30% cheaper.
Medium usage:
Canada 500,63
United States 635,85
Canada 21% cheaper
High usage:
Canada 563,20
United States 635,85
Canada 11% cheaper
Where I'm from, cheaper means having a lower price than something else, and all three usage groups places Canada at a lower price than the USA.
As for you being raped by your phone company, it boils down to the same answer as everything else - you don't really need it. If you're required to have one for your job, have them pay for everything. It's very nice to have a cell phone, that much is true, but we somehow managed without them back in the 80's, even if you got stuck on the side of the road. Sure, it'd suck if it was in a blizzard or desert or the like, but then again, it might as well be in an area without coverage - then you're equally screwed unless you happen to have a satellite phone, and I suspect they're even more expensive.