And not for the tinfoil hat security reasons, but because it undermines the ideals of equal justice under the law for all. Rich people should NOT be able to buy preferential security treatment. If the law is "everyone gets their anus searched for bombs", then we all get in the same line and have the same kind of search. Simply having the money to buy an ID card that "proves" you've got a clean anus isn't equal protection under the law, it's preferential treatment for sale.
And the same goes for people who claim that they should have it because they're frequent fliers -- that's just a way of abstracting the fact that you have a lot of money.
Any law should be applied as equally as possible, ESPECIALLY if the law is some national security measure that happens to be a major invasion of your privacy and a general pain in the ass like airport security.
NO special rights for the rich, ESPECIALLY no special security rights for the rich.
They buy herbal supplements for every medical condition imaginable right now. My dad, who was a salesman, got rooked into a couple of different herbal supplements including coral calcium. To this day we almost get violent arguing about the worthlessness of coral calcium.
But look at all the people that have bought into herbal medicine. I'm sure there are some herbal remedies that do something, but many of them are failing double-blind studies (St. John's Wort) as they get tried, and many have just never been studied -- anecdotal evidence and mystically decoded ancient remedies are as close as they get.
People are suckers for anything they think will work cheaper than what they use now.
If we only took the time and effort to enforce the pre-existing laws on the books against fraudulent business practices, selling schedule II and III narcotics without a prescription, securities fraud, piracy, etc spam would lighten tremendously.
Unfortunately our present administration is only interested in prosecuting "terrorism" and anything that vaguely represents business gets a pass.
Our government, unfortunately, has a long history of tolerating fraudulent business practices couched as "aggressive sales practices" -- frequency alone isn't the reason people are pissed at telemarketers, it's the government's total denial of the scope of fraud and sleazy practices and the piss-poor resources devoted to those agencies that actually try to do anything about it (and the resource squeezes are totally political, as industry lobbyists work to starve fraud enforcement "because it hurts business.")
It's a reasonable question, but if you enter the realm of speculation with "...but we could be wrong.." or "..in the past we used to think...", then anything is possible and we're unable to reach any conclusions and everything is possible -- dragons, unicorns, gnomes, trolls, little green men -- because these things too might someday be understandable by physics/science.
I personally prefer to make a conclucision -- which I'm perfectly willing to change in the future, when better evidence or logic is shown to me -- based upon what we know and what our knowledge best suggests. Speculating beyond that enters you into the realm of pure faith.
They still are common in larger metropolitan areas. Minneapolis' still has its, which delivers steam as well as cold water for cooling. I park in a parking ramp roughly built "around" the plant, and there's another plant on the other side of downtown.
Parking in it has had two experiences, one weird and one just annoying. The annoying thing is I get a discount for parking on the exposed top of the ramp; the bad thing is that your car not only gets all of Mother Nature's finest, but all the hard water precipitate from the evaporative cooling towers. There are days (hot, humid) I can't see out of the windshield because there's so many hard water stains.
One day in the morning they were dumping steam out these stacks (not far from where I park, ~50 ft) and it was the loudest thing I have ever heard -- lourder than being under a 747 landing (which I've done) -- I could hear it in my car 2 blocks away, and as I was parking it was so loud I had to cover my ears in my car and not get out until they were done.
Even without the aerospace testing out west and the desire to keep "oopses" from the public for PR and national security reasons, UFOs stop being believable for a whole number of reasons related to the known physics of space travel, the immense distances involved, and so on.
We haven't yet found any habitable planets AT ALL that I'm aware of, let alone of any within a close distance like under a 100 light years. Travel from beyond those distances is an engineering marvel evidencing a vastly superior life form.
What possible interest would that life form have of visiting us in person? Wouldn't they have a technology sufficient to observe us remotely? Even if they did come here in person and crashed one or more ships, how can the government possibly keep something like that a coverup for so long when so many other more morally culpable government coverups have failed (Watergate, COINTELPRO, MK Ultra, ad nauseum)?
Does something of this size produce enough waste heat (ie, post-turbine steam) to effectively heat some buildings in one of these villages?
There have been some articles in the local press here in Minnesota about the (unfortunate, IMHO) demise of "municipal heating districts" in some small communities. Basically they make steam in a common plant and pipe it all over main street as well as some residential homes. I believe some systems generate electricity as well and merely use the waste heat from that process for heating.
Many of the systems date from the 1910s and 1920s and are being phased out because of deferred maintenance, dying main streets and a desire to get the city out of the steam business. Which is sad, considering its more energy efficient generate steam centrally versus a ton of individual furnances (particularly if its waste heat from electrical generation), many of these systems are actually quite resiliant considering they haven't seen significant maintenance in 25 years and are 75 years or older.
I just wish we had 1/3 of the balls of that company and that fucking up with the company computer was seen as destructive and damaging as it actually is.
The countless whining we get over passwords ("My boss says I dont hafta have one.."), applying updates to desktops(!), removing shit like comet cursor, and the people that toss laptops around and then bitch that they don't have the right laptop after they've broken it.
I'd love to see 2 or 3 people in particular have to sit down in front of the CFO and be told:
1) The computer you broke won't be replaced until you pay for the old one.
2) If you can write a check today, we won't dock your paycheck, but if we do, we'll spread the payment over at least 4 paychecks.
3) Any work you don't get done due to no computer will be considered against you in your next performance review and may be considered grounds for dismissal.
There's lots of reasons not to do it that way, but geeze, if there were real consequences (financially especially) for being a fuckup with computers, I think the users would toe a much tighter line.
I just hope Apple's contracts with the major labels are IRON-CLAD with no escape clauses.
If this pissed MS off enough, they could easily try to buy the business away by promising the major labels 125% of the first 2 million sales and 90% of the second -- ie, eat all the costs as well as pay a premium for profits.
Total billable calls: $7.29 "Long Distance" portion including fees: $21.34.
The local dialtone is a lot like that as well, with the actual basic fee for dialtone coming in around $20, and all the taxes, fees, and other regulatory crapola coming in around $12.
We need to just eliminate all these fees. If the fucking government wants to tax us, be a man about it and tax me directly, don't sneak it in on the phone bill.
Supersonic travel would probably work over mainland US if it was limited to high-altitude (over 30k ft) use over low-population areas.
However, knowing how well the local airline has bought into quiet-flight operations around here, they'd want to kick in the afterburners or whatever's involved in going supersonic about 5000 ft from the end of the runway.
It works exactly as you suspect, it originates a connection to Vonage and that channel is used for signalling with their gateway. It may or may not open a second channel to handle actual voice packets, but this connection would be originated by the client end.
The classical NAT problem the parent poster was referring to is having both ends of a VoIP session behind NAT where neither can technically communicate with each other since neither is technically reachable from the internet, which is a problem that port mapping handles easily.
The other problem could be a signalling protocol that negotiates a new port number for a data connection, ala "active" FTP. IMHO this is a broken protocol.
There's two easy solutions to NAT, and they're the same solutions we've been applying to any internal device or service:
1) Static NAT port mapping to internal bridges or phones, like people do now for game/web/mail/etc servers behind NAT gateways. Requires a VoIP standard that doesn't do something lame ala active FTP and negotiate port numbers and IP addresses inside packets.
2) Protocol-standard bridging software or agents that can be integrated into NAT devices to provide NAT-friendly bridging for incoming calls.
1 is better for small places, 2 for lager places that will likely have an internet facing bridge or call manager anyway.
Even with protocol snafus like NAT and the like, a $50 VoIP handset that can speak to any other VoIP handset will create its own solutions.
The tipping point for VoIP will be going to the local discount store and being able to buy a standards-compliant phone with ethernet and/or POTS (depending on the desire to bridge to POTS) for less than $50. Add slightly more money for greater features (more POTS lines, 802.11, cordless, voicemail, etc).
In other words, the standards for VoIP need to crystalize to the point where interoperability with gatekeepers and other switch-like devices is a given, and not some game of vendor lock-in. I should be able to buy a Samsung/Apex/Sampo/$cheap_asian_brand VoIP phone, plug it into my ethernet network and have it just plain work with other VoIP phones, bridges, etc.
How or what the various numbering protocols work isn't the tipping point. The PSTN is too big and complex and the legacy devices too numerous to think that a new, acronym-loaded, buzzword-compliant numbering scheme will make a difference. For VoIP to matter it must initially be transparent to the POTS world, and that means telephone numbers and bridging.
Vonage is on the right track here as a bridging service. Their POTS bridge device is on the right track at least conceptually, although I can't comment on its protocol neutrality.
Like that Georgy woman who "ran" for Governor in California, this one's another plain looking geek girl that guys that don't seem to get out enough wet their pants over.
Pale, dull and overly long hair, a very boyish figure, and a very plain face. I guess she's better than some of the fat goth chicks with bad complexions, but she's not terribly pretty either.
If your goal is to only watch movies that match your technical specifications, you're not watching much because I'm not even sure most DVDs are anamorphic, many are just letterboxed, which means hitting the zoom button and dealing with even lower resolution if you want to fill the screen, or a smaller image if you don't zoom it.
Not everyone may have a 4:3 TV, but the overwhelming number of people do. I'm just too cheap to spend $3k on a decent large, widescreen, HDTV set as there's just not enough 16:9 and/or HD programming to justify it.
If you get a high end cable package ($65/mo for me) with a couple of dozen or more commercial-free digital movie channels, a Tivo and a DVD-R like the Panasonic E80, you can pretty quickly build a high-quality movie library, both in terms of picture quality and in terms of critical quality.
It's not as good as a DVD if you're a PQ freak or an "extras" freak, but it's fine if you care about just watching the movie.
I'm not a developer outside of some pretty ugly shell & perl scripts, but from what I've read here on Slashdot (which is a disclaimer unto itself), high level languages and APIs tend to promote lots and lots of data structures which aren't always memory efficient. Could use of all the Apple APIs and/or C++ have anything to do with this?
It's alternativitis -- the desire to embrace something other than the norm primarily for the sake of embracing something other than the norm. There may or may not be valid reasons for doing so, but those are just rationalizations.
If djbdns and qmail are so good, why aren't they defaults any distros? Why hasn't FreeBSD, which has an excellent reputation for stability and the overall quality of the whole package, chosen to make them defaults over sendmail and bind?
The bottom line should be that you're mileage *shouldn't* vary; a card inserted into one box should do what it does on any other box. I have that kind of luck with video cards, NICs, SCSI, etc providing that drivers and other software bits are all well-written.
The hodgepodge hardware may do well when someone writes better drivers and software for it, but AFAIC under Windows it was a joke.
Haven't used the USB one, but I have personal experience with the 350 and a close friend has had experience with the 250.
The 350 I got wouldn't even work at all on my system until I called Hodgepodge technical support and downloaded all new "beta" drivers and firmware. Even then it was appalling -- on a P3 1.03Ghz box, CPU was pegged at 100% during recording and playback, rendering the apps nearly unusable.
The MPEG2 files created by the 350 are not compliant with DVD players, none would play on another system with a software DVD player installed that WILL play MPEG2s from TMPGENC or other sources.
And speaking of their software, it is a disgusting HODGE-PODGE of codes from here, drivers from there, apps from six other places. You don't get good integration with anything, especially higher-end products like Premiere.
Sorry, but if you want something worthwhile that works well, then the cheapie hodgepodge solution doesn't cut it, and you're looking at a $1k card from someone like Matrox.
...is a necessity for any reeasonable video capture setup. I'm sure a vanilla P4 2.8 has the horsepower to do it in real time, but layering on Windows, unplanned interrupts + preemption, and other active hardware INVARIABLY leads to dropped frames or other glitches.
I'm actually quite surprised that nobody has managed to build a card that will do MPEG2 record and play in hardware as well as assisting conversions to/from MPEG2 *and* sold it for under $1k. Whenever I've looked for one I always end up in the 'prosumer' market looking at expensive cards.
You can do fairly well with firewire capture, but then you STILL are stuck with painful MPEG2 conversion if you want to make DVDs or SVCDs, which I think most people reasonably want to end up with eventually.
I"m actually surprised Apple of all people hasn't decided to just embrace MPEG2 and stick a really good MPEG2 chip in their systems for this purpose. "Look Ma, MPEG2 conversion/capture/play and 0 percent CPU utilization."
It seems to me that even though the data carried by a phone conversation at even normal rates of 56kbps is pretty small, by the time you add in packet overhead, framing, etc, you're actually talking more like 70kbps or more in actual bandwidth consumed, and I've yet to see a 802.11b station that could really deliver more than 800-900kbps in even ideal conditions (1 PC, 1 base station, adjacent to each other).
Which means you MIGHT get 10 active voice calls on a single base station without running into drops and other problems. It might be great for an in-home cordless phone setup or an isolated small business, but given the small number of channels and density, I can't see it working elsewhere.
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And not for the tinfoil hat security reasons, but because it undermines the ideals of equal justice under the law for all. Rich people should NOT be able to buy preferential security treatment. If the law is "everyone gets their anus searched for bombs", then we all get in the same line and have the same kind of search. Simply having the money to buy an ID card that "proves" you've got a clean anus isn't equal protection under the law, it's preferential treatment for sale.
And the same goes for people who claim that they should have it because they're frequent fliers -- that's just a way of abstracting the fact that you have a lot of money.
Any law should be applied as equally as possible, ESPECIALLY if the law is some national security measure that happens to be a major invasion of your privacy and a general pain in the ass like airport security.
NO special rights for the rich, ESPECIALLY no special security rights for the rich.
They buy herbal supplements for every medical condition imaginable right now. My dad, who was a salesman, got rooked into a couple of different herbal supplements including coral calcium. To this day we almost get violent arguing about the worthlessness of coral calcium.
But look at all the people that have bought into herbal medicine. I'm sure there are some herbal remedies that do something, but many of them are failing double-blind studies (St. John's Wort) as they get tried, and many have just never been studied -- anecdotal evidence and mystically decoded ancient remedies are as close as they get.
People are suckers for anything they think will work cheaper than what they use now.
If we only took the time and effort to enforce the pre-existing laws on the books against fraudulent business practices, selling schedule II and III narcotics without a prescription, securities fraud, piracy, etc spam would lighten tremendously.
Unfortunately our present administration is only interested in prosecuting "terrorism" and anything that vaguely represents business gets a pass.
Our government, unfortunately, has a long history of tolerating fraudulent business practices couched as "aggressive sales practices" -- frequency alone isn't the reason people are pissed at telemarketers, it's the government's total denial of the scope of fraud and sleazy practices and the piss-poor resources devoted to those agencies that actually try to do anything about it (and the resource squeezes are totally political, as industry lobbyists work to starve fraud enforcement "because it hurts business.")
It's a reasonable question, but if you enter the realm of speculation with "...but we could be wrong.." or "..in the past we used to think...", then anything is possible and we're unable to reach any conclusions and everything is possible -- dragons, unicorns, gnomes, trolls, little green men -- because these things too might someday be understandable by physics/science.
I personally prefer to make a conclucision -- which I'm perfectly willing to change in the future, when better evidence or logic is shown to me -- based upon what we know and what our knowledge best suggests. Speculating beyond that enters you into the realm of pure faith.
They still are common in larger metropolitan areas. Minneapolis' still has its, which delivers steam as well as cold water for cooling. I park in a parking ramp roughly built "around" the plant, and there's another plant on the other side of downtown.
Parking in it has had two experiences, one weird and one just annoying. The annoying thing is I get a discount for parking on the exposed top of the ramp; the bad thing is that your car not only gets all of Mother Nature's finest, but all the hard water precipitate from the evaporative cooling towers. There are days (hot, humid) I can't see out of the windshield because there's so many hard water stains.
One day in the morning they were dumping steam out these stacks (not far from where I park, ~50 ft) and it was the loudest thing I have ever heard -- lourder than being under a 747 landing (which I've done) -- I could hear it in my car 2 blocks away, and as I was parking it was so loud I had to cover my ears in my car and not get out until they were done.
Even without the aerospace testing out west and the desire to keep "oopses" from the public for PR and national security reasons, UFOs stop being believable for a whole number of reasons related to the known physics of space travel, the immense distances involved, and so on.
We haven't yet found any habitable planets AT ALL that I'm aware of, let alone of any within a close distance like under a 100 light years. Travel from beyond those distances is an engineering marvel evidencing a vastly superior life form.
What possible interest would that life form have of visiting us in person? Wouldn't they have a technology sufficient to observe us remotely? Even if they did come here in person and crashed one or more ships, how can the government possibly keep something like that a coverup for so long when so many other more morally culpable government coverups have failed (Watergate, COINTELPRO, MK Ultra, ad nauseum)?
Does something of this size produce enough waste heat (ie, post-turbine steam) to effectively heat some buildings in one of these villages?
There have been some articles in the local press here in Minnesota about the (unfortunate, IMHO) demise of "municipal heating districts" in some small communities. Basically they make steam in a common plant and pipe it all over main street as well as some residential homes. I believe some systems generate electricity as well and merely use the waste heat from that process for heating.
Many of the systems date from the 1910s and 1920s and are being phased out because of deferred maintenance, dying main streets and a desire to get the city out of the steam business. Which is sad, considering its more energy efficient generate steam centrally versus a ton of individual furnances (particularly if its waste heat from electrical generation), many of these systems are actually quite resiliant considering they haven't seen significant maintenance in 25 years and are 75 years or older.
I just wish we had 1/3 of the balls of that company and that fucking up with the company computer was seen as destructive and damaging as it actually is.
The countless whining we get over passwords ("My boss says I dont hafta have one.."), applying updates to desktops(!), removing shit like comet cursor, and the people that toss laptops around and then bitch that they don't have the right laptop after they've broken it.
I'd love to see 2 or 3 people in particular have to sit down in front of the CFO and be told:
1) The computer you broke won't be replaced until you pay for the old one.
2) If you can write a check today, we won't dock your paycheck, but if we do, we'll spread the payment over at least 4 paychecks.
3) Any work you don't get done due to no computer will be considered against you in your next performance review and may be considered grounds for dismissal.
There's lots of reasons not to do it that way, but geeze, if there were real consequences (financially especially) for being a fuckup with computers, I think the users would toe a much tighter line.
I just hope Apple's contracts with the major labels are IRON-CLAD with no escape clauses.
If this pissed MS off enough, they could easily try to buy the business away by promising the major labels 125% of the first 2 million sales and 90% of the second -- ie, eat all the costs as well as pay a premium for profits.
We have some low-end long distance plan from MCI.
Total billable calls: $7.29
"Long Distance" portion including fees: $21.34.
The local dialtone is a lot like that as well, with the actual basic fee for dialtone coming in around $20, and all the taxes, fees, and other regulatory crapola coming in around $12.
We need to just eliminate all these fees. If the fucking government wants to tax us, be a man about it and tax me directly, don't sneak it in on the phone bill.
Supersonic travel would probably work over mainland US if it was limited to high-altitude (over 30k ft) use over low-population areas.
However, knowing how well the local airline has bought into quiet-flight operations around here, they'd want to kick in the afterburners or whatever's involved in going supersonic about 5000 ft from the end of the runway.
It works exactly as you suspect, it originates a connection to Vonage and that channel is used for signalling with their gateway. It may or may not open a second channel to handle actual voice packets, but this connection would be originated by the client end.
The classical NAT problem the parent poster was referring to is having both ends of a VoIP session behind NAT where neither can technically communicate with each other since neither is technically reachable from the internet, which is a problem that port mapping handles easily.
The other problem could be a signalling protocol that negotiates a new port number for a data connection, ala "active" FTP. IMHO this is a broken protocol.
There's two easy solutions to NAT, and they're the same solutions we've been applying to any internal device or service:
1) Static NAT port mapping to internal bridges or phones, like people do now for game/web/mail/etc servers behind NAT gateways. Requires a VoIP standard that doesn't do something lame ala active FTP and negotiate port numbers and IP addresses inside packets.
2) Protocol-standard bridging software or agents that can be integrated into NAT devices to provide NAT-friendly bridging for incoming calls.
1 is better for small places, 2 for lager places that will likely have an internet facing bridge or call manager anyway.
Even with protocol snafus like NAT and the like, a $50 VoIP handset that can speak to any other VoIP handset will create its own solutions.
The tipping point for VoIP will be going to the local discount store and being able to buy a standards-compliant phone with ethernet and/or POTS (depending on the desire to bridge to POTS) for less than $50. Add slightly more money for greater features (more POTS lines, 802.11, cordless, voicemail, etc).
In other words, the standards for VoIP need to crystalize to the point where interoperability with gatekeepers and other switch-like devices is a given, and not some game of vendor lock-in. I should be able to buy a Samsung/Apex/Sampo/$cheap_asian_brand VoIP phone, plug it into my ethernet network and have it just plain work with other VoIP phones, bridges, etc.
How or what the various numbering protocols work isn't the tipping point. The PSTN is too big and complex and the legacy devices too numerous to think that a new, acronym-loaded, buzzword-compliant numbering scheme will make a difference. For VoIP to matter it must initially be transparent to the POTS world, and that means telephone numbers and bridging.
Vonage is on the right track here as a bridging service. Their POTS bridge device is on the right track at least conceptually, although I can't comment on its protocol neutrality.
Like that Georgy woman who "ran" for Governor in California, this one's another plain looking geek girl that guys that don't seem to get out enough wet their pants over.
Pale, dull and overly long hair, a very boyish figure, and a very plain face. I guess she's better than some of the fat goth chicks with bad complexions, but she's not terribly pretty either.
Sorry, you can have her.
If your goal is to only watch movies that match your technical specifications, you're not watching much because I'm not even sure most DVDs are anamorphic, many are just letterboxed, which means hitting the zoom button and dealing with even lower resolution if you want to fill the screen, or a smaller image if you don't zoom it.
Not everyone may have a 4:3 TV, but the overwhelming number of people do. I'm just too cheap to spend $3k on a decent large, widescreen, HDTV set as there's just not enough 16:9 and/or HD programming to justify it.
If you get a high end cable package ($65/mo for me) with a couple of dozen or more commercial-free digital movie channels, a Tivo and a DVD-R like the Panasonic E80, you can pretty quickly build a high-quality movie library, both in terms of picture quality and in terms of critical quality.
It's not as good as a DVD if you're a PQ freak or an "extras" freak, but it's fine if you care about just watching the movie.
So presumably the people making Linux and BSD distros are just as ignorant as the sheep who buy Windows without thinking? Right. I buy that.
I'm not a developer outside of some pretty ugly shell & perl scripts, but from what I've read here on Slashdot (which is a disclaimer unto itself), high level languages and APIs tend to promote lots and lots of data structures which aren't always memory efficient. Could use of all the Apple APIs and/or C++ have anything to do with this?
It's alternativitis -- the desire to embrace something other than the norm primarily for the sake of embracing something other than the norm. There may or may not be valid reasons for doing so, but those are just rationalizations.
If djbdns and qmail are so good, why aren't they defaults any distros? Why hasn't FreeBSD, which has an excellent reputation for stability and the overall quality of the whole package, chosen to make them defaults over sendmail and bind?
The bottom line should be that you're mileage *shouldn't* vary; a card inserted into one box should do what it does on any other box. I have that kind of luck with video cards, NICs, SCSI, etc providing that drivers and other software bits are all well-written.
The hodgepodge hardware may do well when someone writes better drivers and software for it, but AFAIC under Windows it was a joke.
Haven't used the USB one, but I have personal experience with the 350 and a close friend has had experience with the 250.
The 350 I got wouldn't even work at all on my system until I called Hodgepodge technical support and downloaded all new "beta" drivers and firmware. Even then it was appalling -- on a P3 1.03Ghz box, CPU was pegged at 100% during recording and playback, rendering the apps nearly unusable.
The MPEG2 files created by the 350 are not compliant with DVD players, none would play on another system with a software DVD player installed that WILL play MPEG2s from TMPGENC or other sources.
And speaking of their software, it is a disgusting HODGE-PODGE of codes from here, drivers from there, apps from six other places. You don't get good integration with anything, especially higher-end products like Premiere.
Sorry, but if you want something worthwhile that works well, then the cheapie hodgepodge solution doesn't cut it, and you're looking at a $1k card from someone like Matrox.
...is a necessity for any reeasonable video capture setup. I'm sure a vanilla P4 2.8 has the horsepower to do it in real time, but layering on Windows, unplanned interrupts + preemption, and other active hardware INVARIABLY leads to dropped frames or other glitches.
I'm actually quite surprised that nobody has managed to build a card that will do MPEG2 record and play in hardware as well as assisting conversions to/from MPEG2 *and* sold it for under $1k. Whenever I've looked for one I always end up in the 'prosumer' market looking at expensive cards.
You can do fairly well with firewire capture, but then you STILL are stuck with painful MPEG2 conversion if you want to make DVDs or SVCDs, which I think most people reasonably want to end up with eventually.
I"m actually surprised Apple of all people hasn't decided to just embrace MPEG2 and stick a really good MPEG2 chip in their systems for this purpose. "Look Ma, MPEG2 conversion/capture/play and 0 percent CPU utilization."
It seems to me that even though the data carried by a phone conversation at even normal rates of 56kbps is pretty small, by the time you add in packet overhead, framing, etc, you're actually talking more like 70kbps or more in actual bandwidth consumed, and I've yet to see a 802.11b station that could really deliver more than 800-900kbps in even ideal conditions (1 PC, 1 base station, adjacent to each other).
Which means you MIGHT get 10 active voice calls on a single base station without running into drops and other problems. It might be great for an in-home cordless phone setup or an isolated small business, but given the small number of channels and density, I can't see it working elsewhere.