Other possibilities?? Maybe a thought experiment will re-activate the logic centers of your brain:
Let's say that I have three monochromatic images, each measuring the intensity of light at 430nm, 550nm, and 700nm. Your task is to turn these three images into a full-color image on a computer screen. These happen to be approximately the primary colors in the CIE RGB color space, so this should be an easy task. You just map the 430nm image to the blue layer, 550 to the green, and 700nm to the red.
Now I hand you a set of images at 480nm, 530nm, and 680nm. These are still reasonably close to the CIE RGB primaries, so you can probably do the same thing. But will the resulting image look the same? Or will there be subtle differences in color? (Hint: the second one.)
Let's replace the 680nm image with one at 980nm. What do you do now? The red channel is now way out in the infrared. People can't see in that wavelength, so the intensity of light at that wavelength is going to be completely foreign and strange. If you have a chip of paint in this photograph that reflects brightly at ~430nm, and again at ~900nm, what color is this chip going to appear when the red channel is 680nm versus 980nm?
But let's take this one step further. What if I handed you a set of images at 670nm, 800nm, and 980nm? What do you do then? How do you build an RGB images out of wavelengths that are effectively just shades of red and infrared?
There is no need to examine "other possibilities" because this is already well-understood. Everyone that's taken a basic college photography class understands how light and color work. These people are not surprised by this because they understand it. It's like expressing shock and awe about how a house holds itself together, and when a builder goes on about how nails work, you scoff and say, "you need to consider other possibilities!" Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean there's something magic or secret about it.
This has nothing to do with "speed" (bandwidth or data rate) and everything to do with latency. Just because someone has pushed their content to servers that are closer to you doesn't mean those packets get some sort of bump in their priority.
Off-topic, and the author is an idiot. The rovers' cameras do not necessarily take pictures using the standard red-green-blue colors that we perceive. Depending on what filters were used (for scientific reasons), if you want a "full color" image for humans to appreciate, you have to choose or synthesize non-RGB channels to form an RGB image. The blue tab, for example, on the color calibration target is also very bright in the infrared, so if you use an infrared image as your red channel, what should be blue appears to be pink. All of this perfectly normal and completely expected by everyone that knows how this stuff works. Stop being a silly conspiracy theorist and apply some rational thought and a tiny bit of research.
By the same logic, we should ban driving entirely, because teens kill even without cell phones. As always, a proper cost-benefit analysis needs to be done.
they OVERSOLD their resources. didnt act responsibly. just like the bastards who had brought the credit crisis upon the world.
This conclusion seems bizarre to me. The ISPs "oversold their resources" (oversubscribed their data connections) based on sound, rational thinking at the time. They failed to anticipate the explosive growth of bandwidth-hungry services. Hindsight is 20/20. Like every other Big Business, they're going to try and point the finger elsewhere (such as the services "responsible" for that growth). This shouldn't be surprising at all. But I don't think the ISPs were irresponsible for getting us in this state. They just didn't do a good job of foreseeing the bandwidth used by future services. Or maybe they foresaw it, but saw that none of their competitors were doing anything about it either, so they chose to ignore it. (If they had been the only ones to make the investment, they wouldn't have been able to remain competitive with those ISPs that chose not to. They might have been vindicated in the end, but would they have survived to get there?)
Of course if both ends just paid a fair price for traffic (which is currently the case), then there does not need to be any complicated scheme of prioritizing packets at each hop based on what you paid to that provider.
Prioritization based on "price paid" is moronic, and not seriously suggested, IMO. OTOH, prioritization is a perfectly legitimate tool for congestion management, which is at the core of the problem here. ISPs have historically oversubscribed based on the prevailing assumptions about customer utilization. Those assumptions no longer hold true, because sites like YouTube and applications like BitTorrent. ISPs can do one or both of increase infrastructure to match these new assumptions (at enormous cost), and/or implement some form of QoS to drop or delay one application's packet instead of another's, when congestion occurs (where a packet has to be dropped or delayed either way). You can still have a "fair price" being paid in either direction, and have a need for QoS (prioritization) to effectively manage congestion. This runs afoul of some definitions of "net neutrality", unfortunately, and is impractical to do anyway on an untrusted network (like the public Internet).
So ISPs are actually stuck between a rock and a hard place. You have to oversubscribe to be cost-effective (this is why business-grade 1Mbit data connections cost 10x more than consumer-grade; the former is not oversubscribed while the latter is). But since that ratio has to go down to match today's expectations (through no "fault" of the ISPs), ISPs have discovered that they have to invest in significant new infrastructure, and they're looking for creative ways to pay for that. Unfortunately, most telco ISPs aren't exactly creative, so this is what we get.
Unfortunately, this strategy could actually be effective, since many areas are served by a monopoly broadband provider. If their customers suddenly were unable to access Google, there's not much they could do about it. They might lose some customers, but it's possible that the loss of ad revenue for Google would be worth more. This would almost certainly go to court, which is something Google is hoping to preempt by pushing for net neutrality regulation up front.
Consumers pay for their consumer broadband connections. This includes the outbound costs (fetching a web page from Google) and inbound costs (the web page content).
Google pays for its connections as well, which includes more:
1. The inbound costs of your requests 2. The outbound costs of the content you requested 3. The outbound costs of requests against web sites (to crawl the web) 4. The inbound costs of those replies
Google is effectively downloading the entire Interweb, over and over. That's a lot of data. But every bit transferred is subject to some mutually-satisfactory business agreement. Every one of Google's network peers is fine transiting this data. If they weren't, they'd dissolve the agreement and/or start charging more.
...INVESTED the HUGE profits they made from OVERSELLING bandwith for all those years, there would be NO issue about bandwidth anywhere.
I don't think I agree with that. People will always find ways to use up their bandwidth. Yesterday, it was MP3s. Today it's DVDs. Tomorrow it'll be Bluray. Next week maybe it'll be always-on über-resolution live video streams. Give everyone gigabit connections and people will find a way to use that bandwidth.
The problem here isn't so much that the bandwidth is oversubscribed. You have to oversubscribe. The problem is that the key assumptions they made when deciding how much to oversubscribe by no longer hold true. People are finding ways of increasing their Internet utilization. Averages go up. ISPs have to reduce oversubscription, and pay for that new infrastructure somehow, or implement some form of QoS and piss off "net neutrality" advocates.
The report makes a wild-ass-guess that Google pays $344M for its bandwidth, and that since (allegedly) 16.5% of a user's broadband bandwidth is for Google content, and consumers pay $44 billion for broadband in the US, Google is cheating "taxpayers" (WTF?) out of $6.9 billion.
Of course, the numbers are dubious to start with, comparing mixed fruit to oranges, and suggesting that a major Internet content provider (and consumer) should have to pay the same rates as residential broadband customers is flat out laughable (though perhaps a nice goal). If anything, all this report shows is that consumers are paying 21x more than Google is, suggesting those same ISPs are robbing them blind and (in this guy's case) stupid.
It seems plausible that the Cylons chose the form for their human evolution from a set of real humans that they revered. So maybe we will see those original humans, with a dozen story arcs that try to explain why.
Well then why don't the ISPs upgrade their own infrastructure to handle the increased traffic and charge their users accordingly to cover the cost?
Two things:
There will always be people saturating their data connections. If it's BT transfers of DVDs today, it'll be Bluray transfers tomorrow. The day after? Who knows. If you upgrade your infrastructure, this just raises the speed limits for these people, who will quickly find ways to hit it. It's an arms race that isn't likely to be won by the ISPs in the near future, if ever.
The costs of upgrading to support a massive increase in utilization of a subset's "unlimited" data connections is, in turn, massive. If you try to pass these costs evenly onto the user, they will flock to other, cheaper ISPs, that haven't "upgraded". Because most people don't care if they have 10Mbit of guaranteed bandwidth, so long as they have ~10Mbit occasionally for surfing the web.
IMO, unmetered service like this is only sustainable when your outliers can't have this dramatic an effect.
Put another way, what do you think would happen if someone said "essentially unlimited 10Mbit for $10/month, but no BitTorrent allowed" versus "unlimited 10Mbit, BitTorrent OK, for $500/month". We're stuck in between these two extremes right now, trying to keep the average price the same while reducing the impact of BT users. If you start blocking more than other ISPs, you can get your average price down and outcompete other ISPs, but you get negative press and the attention of regulators. If you block less than other ISPs, BT-heavy users start moving to your ISP, exacerbating the problem, driving your costs up. ISPs are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The only way "unlimited" plans can work in a BitTorrent world is through heavy traffic management. But now we have BT clients saying they're going to find ways to disguise the traffic to get around that.
Here's what I predict will happen:
ISPs will start declaring up front their traffic management policies. This is usually the chief complaint when customers hear about filtering after they've signed up. But rather than raise prices, I think it's easier for them to be more up front about what they're going to start blocking.
ISPs will ban outright the practice of "hiding" your BT traffic to avoid those policies. You can pretty easily tell the difference between typical DNS lookups, and BT-over-UDP-port-53. These customers should be disconnected for these deceptive practices. This hard hand will earn a bit of negative press, and a few people will come out with sob stories about how application X apparently made them look like a dirty BT user, and got them cut off without the possibility of appeal.
As more sophisticated techniques arise for hiding traffic in ways that can't be obviously detected, ISPs will move in two directions:
A new type of "unlimited" plan that comes with heavy restrictions: Only pre-authorized traffic, probably proxied through the ISP, is permitted. SSL might be more tricky, but the ISP can attempt to sniff out bogus SSL servers. The heavy restrictions in this plan will probably make it unattractive even if you could masquerade your file transfers over SSL.
A metered plan with no restrictions whatsoever. Use what you want, when you want.
You might say you need a single DNS root zone but you'd e wrong there too. Some people may want only.com and.us.
.com and.us are just roots of their own trees. Here, the roots are named, and you still need some authority to guarantee that this one.com is the same.com that everyone else is looking at. Once you distribute that function, you introduce ambiguity. What happens when someone else wants to start up their own.com? How do you guarantee that the "real".com is the one people see if you have no central authority? Sure, you can distribute all of this via USENET, but you still have to get everyone to agree upon an authority.
IANAL. Your agreement with the HOA is part of the deed to your house. You are absolutely free to breach this agreement, but this usually means you'd no longer be entitled to your house. HOAs are often subject to many additional laws and restrictions, but what is being described here can be accomplished with a basic contract. "I, so-and-so, agree to buy this house in exchange for $X and agree to honor all of the terms of the HOA. If I fail to honor my HOA obligations, I authorize the HOA to foreclose or place a lien on my home. Signed, so-and-so." So if you breach this agreement, since a remedy is spelled out within it, that's what happens.
They wouldn't necessarily go away. Word would get out, and the prices of the homes subject to that HOA will fall until people think the low price of owning a home there is worth the crap they'd have to put up with from the HOA.
It's possible, though, that property values would fall enough for people to take notice and improve their HOA.
I know people who have lost outrageous suits because they failed to show up in court.
It depends entirely on where the case was brought, but usually a judge requires some proof before allowing a default judgment. The hands of judges aren't as tied in these matters as you think.
I can't imagine a way that this would work that would be anything but a total disaster. Since there would (presumably) be no central authority, you have no way of knowing that http://example.com/ is the same http://example.com/ that someone else is looking at. How would you share links? How would a bank advertise its URL? How would domain registrations work? How would SSL certificate registrations be vetted? If you try to distribute the SSL function as well, now you have no idea if https://example.com/ is the same https://example.com/ that someone else is looking at.
The only way I can see this working is if we switched to a non-hierarchical (hierarchy requires an authority at the root) system, using GUIDs or some other mechanism that has some guarantees about uniqueness. But now you have two problems: 1) the label is useless, because you can't remember it or give it out in a TV commercial; and 2) you'd have store all of those labels someplace in a big, flat database.
A need exists for a set of (reasonably) persistent, unique, meaningful identifiers for services on the Internet, and in order to ensure this, you need a central registry.
It depends on the state and the local government, and how much funding those areas choose to give their schools. I've never heard of a public school anywhere in the US that did not have a computer lab of some kind, and the classes you'd expect to see held in such a lab. Putting computers in individual classrooms (that aren't computer classes/labs) is another matter, and I suspect you'll see a lot of variation from place to place. It's not clear to me how much value this actually provides if the students have access to a lab. I recall in my grade school days having a PC tucked away in the corner of the classroom that never got used (except by the teacher to do grades). So as other posters say, just sticking hardware in a classroom isn't enough.
I suspect this would be more useful as a way to exclude cameras that wouldn't have likely taken the photograph. If you have 100 suspects, and can mostly exclude 95 of them on this basis, that's useful.
Just as RFID tags do not require batteries to give disclose their location and unique identifiers, modern cell phones also have similar functionality batteries or not...
Do elaborate, please. RFID does, in fact, require power. It's just that that power is provided by the reader when in proximity to the tag. Are you suggesting there are RFID tags embedded into "modern cell phones"? Or something else? If you're suggesting that cell towers have the ability to blanket a region with an electric field capable of getting all of the cell phones to respond (loudly enough) to a "ping" for their location, I'm afraid I'm going to have to call BS. So what is this "functionality" that you claim allows cell phones to be identified and located without a battery?
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing should crash anything.
Here are the filters available to the Mars rover camera:
http://www.ominous-valve.com/pancam.html
There's also a picture of the color calibration target through each of these filters. Fire up Gimp and do some mixing and matching.
Other possibilities?? Maybe a thought experiment will re-activate the logic centers of your brain:
Let's say that I have three monochromatic images, each measuring the intensity of light at 430nm, 550nm, and 700nm. Your task is to turn these three images into a full-color image on a computer screen. These happen to be approximately the primary colors in the CIE RGB color space, so this should be an easy task. You just map the 430nm image to the blue layer, 550 to the green, and 700nm to the red.
Now I hand you a set of images at 480nm, 530nm, and 680nm. These are still reasonably close to the CIE RGB primaries, so you can probably do the same thing. But will the resulting image look the same? Or will there be subtle differences in color? (Hint: the second one.)
Let's replace the 680nm image with one at 980nm. What do you do now? The red channel is now way out in the infrared. People can't see in that wavelength, so the intensity of light at that wavelength is going to be completely foreign and strange. If you have a chip of paint in this photograph that reflects brightly at ~430nm, and again at ~900nm, what color is this chip going to appear when the red channel is 680nm versus 980nm?
But let's take this one step further. What if I handed you a set of images at 670nm, 800nm, and 980nm? What do you do then? How do you build an RGB images out of wavelengths that are effectively just shades of red and infrared?
There is no need to examine "other possibilities" because this is already well-understood. Everyone that's taken a basic college photography class understands how light and color work. These people are not surprised by this because they understand it. It's like expressing shock and awe about how a house holds itself together, and when a builder goes on about how nails work, you scoff and say, "you need to consider other possibilities!" Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean there's something magic or secret about it.
This has nothing to do with "speed" (bandwidth or data rate) and everything to do with latency. Just because someone has pushed their content to servers that are closer to you doesn't mean those packets get some sort of bump in their priority.
Off-topic, and the author is an idiot. The rovers' cameras do not necessarily take pictures using the standard red-green-blue colors that we perceive. Depending on what filters were used (for scientific reasons), if you want a "full color" image for humans to appreciate, you have to choose or synthesize non-RGB channels to form an RGB image. The blue tab, for example, on the color calibration target is also very bright in the infrared, so if you use an infrared image as your red channel, what should be blue appears to be pink. All of this perfectly normal and completely expected by everyone that knows how this stuff works. Stop being a silly conspiracy theorist and apply some rational thought and a tiny bit of research.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoagland/mars_colors.html
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/spirit/a12_20040128.html
Doesn't personalization help provide that?
By the same logic, we should ban driving entirely, because teens kill even without cell phones. As always, a proper cost-benefit analysis needs to be done.
Or, depending on how they spin it, they might also lash out at Google. Don't forget that some people actually believe the drivel AT&T is spouting.
This conclusion seems bizarre to me. The ISPs "oversold their resources" (oversubscribed their data connections) based on sound, rational thinking at the time. They failed to anticipate the explosive growth of bandwidth-hungry services. Hindsight is 20/20. Like every other Big Business, they're going to try and point the finger elsewhere (such as the services "responsible" for that growth). This shouldn't be surprising at all. But I don't think the ISPs were irresponsible for getting us in this state. They just didn't do a good job of foreseeing the bandwidth used by future services. Or maybe they foresaw it, but saw that none of their competitors were doing anything about it either, so they chose to ignore it. (If they had been the only ones to make the investment, they wouldn't have been able to remain competitive with those ISPs that chose not to. They might have been vindicated in the end, but would they have survived to get there?)
Prioritization based on "price paid" is moronic, and not seriously suggested, IMO. OTOH, prioritization is a perfectly legitimate tool for congestion management, which is at the core of the problem here. ISPs have historically oversubscribed based on the prevailing assumptions about customer utilization. Those assumptions no longer hold true, because sites like YouTube and applications like BitTorrent. ISPs can do one or both of increase infrastructure to match these new assumptions (at enormous cost), and/or implement some form of QoS to drop or delay one application's packet instead of another's, when congestion occurs (where a packet has to be dropped or delayed either way). You can still have a "fair price" being paid in either direction, and have a need for QoS (prioritization) to effectively manage congestion. This runs afoul of some definitions of "net neutrality", unfortunately, and is impractical to do anyway on an untrusted network (like the public Internet).
So ISPs are actually stuck between a rock and a hard place. You have to oversubscribe to be cost-effective (this is why business-grade 1Mbit data connections cost 10x more than consumer-grade; the former is not oversubscribed while the latter is). But since that ratio has to go down to match today's expectations (through no "fault" of the ISPs), ISPs have discovered that they have to invest in significant new infrastructure, and they're looking for creative ways to pay for that. Unfortunately, most telco ISPs aren't exactly creative, so this is what we get.
Unfortunately, this strategy could actually be effective, since many areas are served by a monopoly broadband provider. If their customers suddenly were unable to access Google, there's not much they could do about it. They might lose some customers, but it's possible that the loss of ad revenue for Google would be worth more. This would almost certainly go to court, which is something Google is hoping to preempt by pushing for net neutrality regulation up front.
Consumers pay for their consumer broadband connections. This includes the outbound costs (fetching a web page from Google) and inbound costs (the web page content).
Google pays for its connections as well, which includes more:
1. The inbound costs of your requests
2. The outbound costs of the content you requested
3. The outbound costs of requests against web sites (to crawl the web)
4. The inbound costs of those replies
Google is effectively downloading the entire Interweb, over and over. That's a lot of data. But every bit transferred is subject to some mutually-satisfactory business agreement. Every one of Google's network peers is fine transiting this data. If they weren't, they'd dissolve the agreement and/or start charging more.
I don't think I agree with that. People will always find ways to use up their bandwidth. Yesterday, it was MP3s. Today it's DVDs. Tomorrow it'll be Bluray. Next week maybe it'll be always-on über-resolution live video streams. Give everyone gigabit connections and people will find a way to use that bandwidth.
The problem here isn't so much that the bandwidth is oversubscribed. You have to oversubscribe. The problem is that the key assumptions they made when deciding how much to oversubscribe by no longer hold true. People are finding ways of increasing their Internet utilization. Averages go up. ISPs have to reduce oversubscription, and pay for that new infrastructure somehow, or implement some form of QoS and piss off "net neutrality" advocates.
The report makes a wild-ass-guess that Google pays $344M for its bandwidth, and that since (allegedly) 16.5% of a user's broadband bandwidth is for Google content, and consumers pay $44 billion for broadband in the US, Google is cheating "taxpayers" (WTF?) out of $6.9 billion.
Of course, the numbers are dubious to start with, comparing mixed fruit to oranges, and suggesting that a major Internet content provider (and consumer) should have to pay the same rates as residential broadband customers is flat out laughable (though perhaps a nice goal). If anything, all this report shows is that consumers are paying 21x more than Google is, suggesting those same ISPs are robbing them blind and (in this guy's case) stupid.
It seems plausible that the Cylons chose the form for their human evolution from a set of real humans that they revered. So maybe we will see those original humans, with a dozen story arcs that try to explain why.
Two things:
There will always be people saturating their data connections. If it's BT transfers of DVDs today, it'll be Bluray transfers tomorrow. The day after? Who knows. If you upgrade your infrastructure, this just raises the speed limits for these people, who will quickly find ways to hit it. It's an arms race that isn't likely to be won by the ISPs in the near future, if ever.
The costs of upgrading to support a massive increase in utilization of a subset's "unlimited" data connections is, in turn, massive. If you try to pass these costs evenly onto the user, they will flock to other, cheaper ISPs, that haven't "upgraded". Because most people don't care if they have 10Mbit of guaranteed bandwidth, so long as they have ~10Mbit occasionally for surfing the web.
IMO, unmetered service like this is only sustainable when your outliers can't have this dramatic an effect.
Put another way, what do you think would happen if someone said "essentially unlimited 10Mbit for $10/month, but no BitTorrent allowed" versus "unlimited 10Mbit, BitTorrent OK, for $500/month". We're stuck in between these two extremes right now, trying to keep the average price the same while reducing the impact of BT users. If you start blocking more than other ISPs, you can get your average price down and outcompete other ISPs, but you get negative press and the attention of regulators. If you block less than other ISPs, BT-heavy users start moving to your ISP, exacerbating the problem, driving your costs up. ISPs are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The only way "unlimited" plans can work in a BitTorrent world is through heavy traffic management. But now we have BT clients saying they're going to find ways to disguise the traffic to get around that.
Here's what I predict will happen:
.com and .us are just roots of their own trees. Here, the roots are named, and you still need some authority to guarantee that this one .com is the same .com that everyone else is looking at. Once you distribute that function, you introduce ambiguity. What happens when someone else wants to start up their own .com? How do you guarantee that the "real" .com is the one people see if you have no central authority? Sure, you can distribute all of this via USENET, but you still have to get everyone to agree upon an authority.
IANAL. Your agreement with the HOA is part of the deed to your house. You are absolutely free to breach this agreement, but this usually means you'd no longer be entitled to your house. HOAs are often subject to many additional laws and restrictions, but what is being described here can be accomplished with a basic contract. "I, so-and-so, agree to buy this house in exchange for $X and agree to honor all of the terms of the HOA. If I fail to honor my HOA obligations, I authorize the HOA to foreclose or place a lien on my home. Signed, so-and-so." So if you breach this agreement, since a remedy is spelled out within it, that's what happens.
They wouldn't necessarily go away. Word would get out, and the prices of the homes subject to that HOA will fall until people think the low price of owning a home there is worth the crap they'd have to put up with from the HOA.
It's possible, though, that property values would fall enough for people to take notice and improve their HOA.
It depends entirely on where the case was brought, but usually a judge requires some proof before allowing a default judgment. The hands of judges aren't as tied in these matters as you think.
I can't imagine a way that this would work that would be anything but a total disaster. Since there would (presumably) be no central authority, you have no way of knowing that http://example.com/ is the same http://example.com/ that someone else is looking at. How would you share links? How would a bank advertise its URL? How would domain registrations work? How would SSL certificate registrations be vetted? If you try to distribute the SSL function as well, now you have no idea if https://example.com/ is the same https://example.com/ that someone else is looking at.
The only way I can see this working is if we switched to a non-hierarchical (hierarchy requires an authority at the root) system, using GUIDs or some other mechanism that has some guarantees about uniqueness. But now you have two problems: 1) the label is useless, because you can't remember it or give it out in a TV commercial; and 2) you'd have store all of those labels someplace in a big, flat database.
A need exists for a set of (reasonably) persistent, unique, meaningful identifiers for services on the Internet, and in order to ensure this, you need a central registry.
It depends on the state and the local government, and how much funding those areas choose to give their schools. I've never heard of a public school anywhere in the US that did not have a computer lab of some kind, and the classes you'd expect to see held in such a lab. Putting computers in individual classrooms (that aren't computer classes/labs) is another matter, and I suspect you'll see a lot of variation from place to place. It's not clear to me how much value this actually provides if the students have access to a lab. I recall in my grade school days having a PC tucked away in the corner of the classroom that never got used (except by the teacher to do grades). So as other posters say, just sticking hardware in a classroom isn't enough.
Check the article for the IP address. Reverse DNS still resolves to that name, but it's not clear to me that forward DNS ever resolved.
I suspect this would be more useful as a way to exclude cameras that wouldn't have likely taken the photograph. If you have 100 suspects, and can mostly exclude 95 of them on this basis, that's useful.
Do elaborate, please. RFID does, in fact, require power. It's just that that power is provided by the reader when in proximity to the tag. Are you suggesting there are RFID tags embedded into "modern cell phones"? Or something else? If you're suggesting that cell towers have the ability to blanket a region with an electric field capable of getting all of the cell phones to respond (loudly enough) to a "ping" for their location, I'm afraid I'm going to have to call BS. So what is this "functionality" that you claim allows cell phones to be identified and located without a battery?