The difficulty is not in the machines, but in the very idea of the machines. It's all about the concept of "trust". Sure, the machines have some code just to paint a couple of boxes marked "John Jackson" and "Jack Johnson", and some more code to count button clicks. But how do you, the voter, know what happened in the mind of the machine? What assurance do you have that when you clicked "John Jackson" that the accumulators for Jack Johnson weren't accidentally or deliberately incremented? You have none.
The short answer is that without the machine producing a physical token (usually in the form of a printed receipt) representing your vote, you don't know. More importantly, you can't know. Any screen you can see assuring you that the machine is perfect can be faked. Promises that the code is perfect are based on inspections and testing, not mathematical proofs. Even if they were, how would you know that they weren't being faked? A bad guy could always replace the program with one of his own that paints a copy of the official "Seal of Assurance" screen.
There are some difficult-for-the-common-man-to-understand signature schemes that could offer more confidence that the program is honestly the one that is supposed to be present, but none of those are in place; even if they were, they can only provide assurance that the program is the one that was signed. They do not offer proof that the code actually works properly.
As I said, physical tokens are the only way to ensure the machines are working accurately. After the election, you count tokens and compare them to the accumulators. But if you have to go as far as producing and counting tokens, why not simply vote by token instead? It's worked for thousands of years, it's as cheap as a pencil and paper, and everybody capable of voting can understand it. You can even count the tokens by machine if you're in a hurry, as long as you can count them manually to prove the machines are honest.
There's a reason Americans vote in November but the politicians don't take office until January. It's to give time to count the votes and certify the elections. Nothing in our laws requires the T.V. news to inform us of the election results within 15 minutes of the polls closing. That's a fabrication that sprung up recently, and has nothing to do with democracy.
The original poster was incorrect in his explanation. The "bit" is implemented in the software, not in the disc. In Windows Vista, Microsoft is calling it the "tilt switch". Any attempt to "subvert" the Protected Media Path is supposed to flip the bit, causing degradation of the signal. This means things like "unsigned drivers" or home-grown ripper type activity.
So while it will be difficult to prove from a single case, bringing together lots of data will bring the proof.
Unfortunately, bringing together lots of data will create a correlation, perhaps a strong correlation. But they will not provide the actual proof. Unless they find harder evidence (payment to a spammer, letters to a co-conspirator, a confession from another involved person) there's nothing to convict them on. Good luck, however highly improbable, is not prima facie evidence of a crime. I don't think a judge would let the case come to trial without more evidence.
This is like investigating any other theft. Investigators could certainly use the correlations to locate these extremely "lucky" investors for further investigation. They would then watch them carefully in their future dealings. But all that presupposes that we have enough investigators to chase down every stock scam and follow every lead. Perhaps the public visibility of these schemes will lead to increased enforcement.
The conflict grew because of the power vacuum that developed after the invasion. The insurgent leaders moved quickly to set up shop before the Iraqis could form a government. Again, I believe the insurgency is being led from outside the country, where they're willing to sacrifice every Iraqi in order to "attack America". The Iraqis are the pawns. They're encouraged by the leaders of the insurgency to see the American shrapnel, and they're told to see the insurgent shrapnel as collateral damage from trying to drive out America. We can never defeat that because we control only the American half of of the damage. Quite simply, to end the bloodshed, we have to leave. And the sooner we can admit that fighting insurgents cannot solve the problem, the sooner we can get out.
Ultimately the only true "winning" solution is to destroy all the leaders of the insurgency. But we have no idea who those people are, where they are hiding, or where they get their funding or munitions.
Probably the best answer is to pull out ASAP and publicly admit defeat. The self-proclaimed "patriots" around here who think the U.S.A. never makes a mistake really need a wake-up call -- we screwed up big in Iraq, we broke it forever, we can't fix it, we can't unscrew a virgin, we can't un-kill a dead body. If our leaving results in an anarchic bloodbath (which is not much of a step over today's level of violence) then we swallow our pride further and beg the U.N. to help clean it up. In return, I expect we'll have to make huge concessions to the U.N. such as "no future U.S.-led invasions without U.N. approval." Even if the U.N. agreed (which I doubt) they will be unable to accomplish anything other than waste time. An Arabian-only coalition might be able to appease the populous and calm the situation, but I believe the Shia-backed insurgents would continue attacking as long as there were Sunni troops in Iraq. And that's assuming you could get two Arab nations to raise a conjoined army without taking up arms against each other, no small feat.
After the pullout, and in total secrecy, I imagine Bush could prepare a covert Mossad-style organization (separate from the CIA, and totally unacknowledged by the administration, think of the NSA's classified charter) devoted to the extermination of the leaders and financiers of the insurgency. They could even be fronted for him by an uninvolved third country with few moral compulsions against executions without trials. There might be a former Soviet bloc country that would like us to owe them a huge favor, and has no love for their own Islamic separatists.) It's a totally criminal approach, but it ultimately would inflict "collateral damage" on far fewer innocents than continuing to fight an unwinnable war in their homeland.
Micromirror arrays have been commercially available for ten years now, and had been in design for at least ten years prior to that. They're used in DLP projectors and projection TVs. You can go buy one at Best Buy if you'd like.
The durability of a micromirror array is actually very high. It's counterintuitive, but not hard to understand. The reason is the mirrors are so tiny. They have very little mass which means they transfer very little stress to their mechanical structure, even under large G force loading.
Think about the normal operating conditions of a micromirror in a DLP TV -- each of those mirrors is designed to flap at 100 kHz. They're already subject to extreme G forces in their everyday operations. Bouncing a chip off the ground is not much force compared to actually using it.
A good question would be the efficiency of light transmission. There's a clear shield mounted over the mirror array, which will attenuate the light both on the way in and on the way out. And the mirrors themselves can not be 100% efficient reflectors. But I suppose with a single pixel detector, you can invest more in making it very sensitive to low light conditions.
the issues will be settled pretty much to IBM/Novell's satisfaction.
Except IBM won't actually be satisfied until they've won their counterclaims and recovered their legal fees. SCO won't last that long, and they won't have a penny for each dollar IBM's spent fighting these greedy fscks.
The robot isn't the problem. The response of calling in an air strike may lead to the results you describe. But calling in your own counter-snipers is a much more fine-grained and appropriate response.
First, anything to help our troops identify and kill those directly responsible for carrying out attacks on them is a huge benefit. I think counter-snipers are the best solution, but they're few and far between. A ground assault on the building would be a lower-key response, but much more risky to American lives. Precision air strikes are a safer alternative to an assault, but as you point out they cause casualties and are visible reminders of the occupation. But letting a sniper live is never the right answer.
The civilians don't care much if Americans kill insurgents, as long as they only kill insurgents. You have to understand that most of the Iraqis are completely sick of the war. They don't care who's fighting whom, who's blowing up whom, they just want it done, they want us out, they want the insurgents to stop.
Unfortunately, "making nice" isn't going to help. There is only a tiny group of people who are responsible for what's happening. They have adopted religion to carry out their agenda, and the power structure of Islam (imams have the local authority to decree whatever they want) makes it pathetically easy for them to subvert it to their own ends by convincing a few crazy fundamentalist imams to follow them. They use attacks for recruitment (as you point out, if the attacks stopped recruitment would drop.) But the attacks don't stop, because the leaders of the insurgency don't want them stopped. For example, the latest rounds of bombing in Baghdad have been in markets serving all faiths; Sunnis, Shiites and Christians all died from the same bomb blast. It's pretty obvious to an outside observer that the goal isn't "kill the Shiites or kill the Sunnis"; instead it's "kill civilians to pressure America and foster more hatred." And it's also become more apparent to everyone that the insurgency has always been coming from Iran. The Iraqis have no particular desire to see their country bombed into the sixth century, but the Iranian "revolutionary guards" don't have to live there, now, do they?
According to the official numbers released PS3 is only 100,000 units behind the WII for Dec.
People keep saying this because the PS3s were on-the-shelf available through most of the Christmas season, while Wiis were sold out on the morning of day one and continued to sell out immediately everywhere throughout the season. Nintendo could have easily sold two or three times what they did if they had the products on the shelves. Sony had their products out in the marketplace, which means they sold all they were capable of selling at their current price point.
There's still a lot of guesstimation, but the Wii is far more popular than the PS3. Not that the PS3 is dying (Sony won't let it) but it's not going to dominate the current console market.
Eeew. Have you ever had to pick up behind Jehovah's witnesses? Their crap is bigger than your St. Bernard's, that's for sure. And they're impossible to train; they just seem to go wherever they want, and crap over entire neighborhoods.
And I'll have you know that just because we own three small dogs (two shitzus and a tibetan terrier) doesn't mean we let them crap just anywhere and don't pick it up. It's not a size-of-the-dog issue, it's an irresponsible owner issue.
Microsoft's DRM is much more "insidious" than Apple's. Sure, iTMS is DRM-laden. But any CD you rip for yourself is simply encoded to AAC or MP3.
With Windows Media Player, any tracks you rip into WMA are encrypted and encumbered with a "license" by default. You have to know in advance to go into preferences and disable the "automatically protect my music with a license" switch.
Once the whole Protected Media Path thing starts visibly preventing people from ripping media, I'm hoping Vista and the Media editions will fall out of favor with the TV-entertainment center crowd.
I thought EAC was a one-button-rip tool. It certainly is if you do the set up for him and show him which one button to click:-). Sure, there's a lot of technical gobbledygook scrolling past him on the screen, but he doesn't have to look at that.
I'm pretty sure he meant 50W, not 50kW. He's talking about bringing communications into a disaster area. I'm picturing a phone booth type setup. A VSAT modem will require a few dozen watts or so. That might leave enough power to fire up an IP telephone handset. If the rest of the gear is powered down, it could have enough to slowly recharge a small laptop battery. But it wouldn't be enough to continuously run the VSAT plus a router and an 802.11 access point; and certainly not enough if you add in a laptop for monitoring, control, and/or customer email. I'm guessing 500 watts is probably closer to reality than 50, especially if he wants to provide a customer-facing terminal for email in addition to any VoIP phones.
50W doesn't sound like enough power or capacity to me. In a disaster you can never have too many phone lines or ways for people to check their email. But then again I'm not the one building or paying for the equipment.
50kW might be required if he was planning on erecting a small regional broadcast transmitter, like an AM radio station. As someone else pointed out though, it would take nearly an acre of solar panels to produce that much energy. It's hardly portable, never mind the initial cost of about $800 per square meter!
Neither Microsoft nor Apple is there yet. Media Centers are still pretty much only one machine with a television interface instead of a computer display. Sure, they record and playback TV, catalog music and show photo albums. But they don't do anything for actual "home" automation. They don't keep recipes, your personal calendar, or your phone book. They don't operate your furnace and air conditioning, adjust your lighting, close your garage door, run your sprinklers or set your burglar alarm. They don't answer your phones, record and playback your messages, or give you a display of the weather next to the door. They don't tell you when you're running out of softener salt or if your last carton of milk is about to expire.
Everything that's been commercially done in this arena so far has been the domain of custom high-end home automation systems. Some hobbyists have built home servers out of whatever they've had (Linux, Windows or Macs.) But no one's hit the mass market yet with the truly "all in one" home server. Microsoft's "smart home" is a cool technology demonstration, but they're still a long way from having one to install in your utility room next to your water heater.
I have no idea how this guy wants to keep his disaster gear stored. Perhaps he'll use lead acid cells with the acid stored in a separate container, filling the batteries only when required. Initially filling them may be dangerous, but they should keep indefinitely with absolutely no maintenance that way, provided the acid container does not deteriorate. Or maybe he wants to take it out and drill with it every six months, at which point he'd be much better off keeping them fully charged.
He simply asked "how fast"? I answered with the speeds I actually get on my gear. I did not parrot some technical spec because I certainly don't get anything near the promised performance.
This is what I just got just now timing the receipt of data from a few pages of Slashdot and Google News. I didn't count any of the time spent navigating to the page, sending the request, or displaying the results. I strictly limited myself to measuring the incoming data rate. I stared timing when I saw the word "receiving" appear, and I stopped timing when the machine began to render the page. I then recorded the page size:
I did get one good bit of reception there at the end: over 2kbytes per second. On average, it's about 1kbyte per second. I don't know whether the pathetic performance is due to native GPRS limitations, crappy Cingular service, horrible Bluetooth on the Motorola cell phone, some combination of the above, or something else. But for me to claim I see 5kbytes per second would be a lie.
Well, I'm sure not getting $20/month benefit out of it, especially at these pedestrian speeds. I was going to drop Cingular completely and switch my four phones to T-Mobile because they have a $20/month unlimited data plan, but the rat-shack guy talked me into trying this one. Since it works, I'm not bailing out on Cingular just yet.
But please, feel free to get a kick out of nickel and diming your customers out of existence. Your network sucks eggs compared to Verizon's, the reigning kings of petty overcharging and customer abuse. You're going to have to be a lot better than you are before you can start treating your customers as shitty as they treat theirs.
As E-85 gains in popularity in the Corn Belt, it's hoped that more farm vehicles will convert to using it, freeing those vehicles from oil dependence as well. Gasoline would be a fine solution for a week or less, but its availability is much less predictable for a month or a year's worth of disaster service.
The Upper Midwestern states are thousands of miles from natural sources of oil, and currently rely entirely on lengthy pipelines carrying crude oil from distant ports to local refineries. A disaster wiping out that infrastructure would reduce the gasoline flow to whatever could be trucked in, and neither the trucking nor the rail industry is anywhere near ready to deliver at our current demand levels for the years it might take to rebuild pipelines and refineries.
Local sources of energy make the most sense for planning for a long-term outage. Uncharged batteries and solar panels may take a while to come on-line, but they're proven reliable and would provide a good long-term solution, (probably the most effective for the 50 watt load the poster mentions.) Distilling corn or switchgrass is certainly worth exploring as an alternative long-term fuel; or perhaps a fuel cell appliance if he has a ready source of methanol.
It's a Bluetooth connection. I'm currently using it with a Palm LifeDrive, but I've had it work with several different Palms (Tungsten T, Tungsten T3, and Tungsten T|C), a friend's PC laptop, and a Mac, too.
The "Setup Devices" button in the Bluetooth preferences will automatically set up most of this stuff for me on my LifeDrive. Palm also provides a standalone "phone setup" app that will do it, too, and they update that regularly with different cell providers.
My LifeDrive is set up to have a "Network" that looks like this: User Name = WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM, Password = CINGULAR1, the connection is the one created when I paired to my Bluetooth phone (create the connection as an additional "LAN" connection, not another "Phone" connection), and the connection type is PPP. I gave it a couple static DNS providers, and let it assign an IP address.
The script is the only trick, and if your device won't set itself up automatically, this is what you would need to write:
Send: atd*99***2# Send: CR WaitFor: CONNECT
This same Hayes dialing string has been tested and works from all those various devices through a Sony Ericsson T637, an S-E T610, and my current Motorola V3 RAZR. The last "2" in the dial sequence tells your phone which network connection it should use, and you may have to change that to a 1, 3 or whatever your phone may require. In my V3, I think that translated into what Motorola calls "Web Sessions".
You can find most of this on the web, I think Cingular's site has it, too.
Of course all that nonsense goes away in June when I get my 8GB iPhone and drop kick this RAZR all the way onto eBay!:-)
Funny, I'm paying $20/month for unlimited GPRS data from Cingular. Just get the data plan on your phone. The plan doesn't care who's requesting data, whether it be the phone or the computer. You don't have to get a special "plan" for your laptop unless you're not smart enough to figure out how to interconnect them on your own.
Slashdot Mirror
The short answer is that without the machine producing a physical token (usually in the form of a printed receipt) representing your vote, you don't know. More importantly, you can't know. Any screen you can see assuring you that the machine is perfect can be faked. Promises that the code is perfect are based on inspections and testing, not mathematical proofs. Even if they were, how would you know that they weren't being faked? A bad guy could always replace the program with one of his own that paints a copy of the official "Seal of Assurance" screen.
There are some difficult-for-the-common-man-to-understand signature schemes that could offer more confidence that the program is honestly the one that is supposed to be present, but none of those are in place; even if they were, they can only provide assurance that the program is the one that was signed. They do not offer proof that the code actually works properly.
As I said, physical tokens are the only way to ensure the machines are working accurately. After the election, you count tokens and compare them to the accumulators. But if you have to go as far as producing and counting tokens, why not simply vote by token instead? It's worked for thousands of years, it's as cheap as a pencil and paper, and everybody capable of voting can understand it. You can even count the tokens by machine if you're in a hurry, as long as you can count them manually to prove the machines are honest.
There's a reason Americans vote in November but the politicians don't take office until January. It's to give time to count the votes and certify the elections. Nothing in our laws requires the T.V. news to inform us of the election results within 15 minutes of the polls closing. That's a fabrication that sprung up recently, and has nothing to do with democracy.
The original poster was incorrect in his explanation. The "bit" is implemented in the software, not in the disc. In Windows Vista, Microsoft is calling it the "tilt switch". Any attempt to "subvert" the Protected Media Path is supposed to flip the bit, causing degradation of the signal. This means things like "unsigned drivers" or home-grown ripper type activity.
Unfortunately, bringing together lots of data will create a correlation, perhaps a strong correlation. But they will not provide the actual proof. Unless they find harder evidence (payment to a spammer, letters to a co-conspirator, a confession from another involved person) there's nothing to convict them on. Good luck, however highly improbable, is not prima facie evidence of a crime. I don't think a judge would let the case come to trial without more evidence.
This is like investigating any other theft. Investigators could certainly use the correlations to locate these extremely "lucky" investors for further investigation. They would then watch them carefully in their future dealings. But all that presupposes that we have enough investigators to chase down every stock scam and follow every lead. Perhaps the public visibility of these schemes will lead to increased enforcement.
Ultimately the only true "winning" solution is to destroy all the leaders of the insurgency. But we have no idea who those people are, where they are hiding, or where they get their funding or munitions.
Probably the best answer is to pull out ASAP and publicly admit defeat. The self-proclaimed "patriots" around here who think the U.S.A. never makes a mistake really need a wake-up call -- we screwed up big in Iraq, we broke it forever, we can't fix it, we can't unscrew a virgin, we can't un-kill a dead body. If our leaving results in an anarchic bloodbath (which is not much of a step over today's level of violence) then we swallow our pride further and beg the U.N. to help clean it up. In return, I expect we'll have to make huge concessions to the U.N. such as "no future U.S.-led invasions without U.N. approval." Even if the U.N. agreed (which I doubt) they will be unable to accomplish anything other than waste time. An Arabian-only coalition might be able to appease the populous and calm the situation, but I believe the Shia-backed insurgents would continue attacking as long as there were Sunni troops in Iraq. And that's assuming you could get two Arab nations to raise a conjoined army without taking up arms against each other, no small feat.
After the pullout, and in total secrecy, I imagine Bush could prepare a covert Mossad-style organization (separate from the CIA, and totally unacknowledged by the administration, think of the NSA's classified charter) devoted to the extermination of the leaders and financiers of the insurgency. They could even be fronted for him by an uninvolved third country with few moral compulsions against executions without trials. There might be a former Soviet bloc country that would like us to owe them a huge favor, and has no love for their own Islamic separatists.) It's a totally criminal approach, but it ultimately would inflict "collateral damage" on far fewer innocents than continuing to fight an unwinnable war in their homeland.
Micromirror arrays have been commercially available for ten years now, and had been in design for at least ten years prior to that. They're used in DLP projectors and projection TVs. You can go buy one at Best Buy if you'd like.
The durability of a micromirror array is actually very high. It's counterintuitive, but not hard to understand. The reason is the mirrors are so tiny. They have very little mass which means they transfer very little stress to their mechanical structure, even under large G force loading.
Think about the normal operating conditions of a micromirror in a DLP TV -- each of those mirrors is designed to flap at 100 kHz. They're already subject to extreme G forces in their everyday operations. Bouncing a chip off the ground is not much force compared to actually using it.
A good question would be the efficiency of light transmission. There's a clear shield mounted over the mirror array, which will attenuate the light both on the way in and on the way out. And the mirrors themselves can not be 100% efficient reflectors. But I suppose with a single pixel detector, you can invest more in making it very sensitive to low light conditions.
Except IBM won't actually be satisfied until they've won their counterclaims and recovered their legal fees. SCO won't last that long, and they won't have a penny for each dollar IBM's spent fighting these greedy fscks.
First, anything to help our troops identify and kill those directly responsible for carrying out attacks on them is a huge benefit. I think counter-snipers are the best solution, but they're few and far between. A ground assault on the building would be a lower-key response, but much more risky to American lives. Precision air strikes are a safer alternative to an assault, but as you point out they cause casualties and are visible reminders of the occupation. But letting a sniper live is never the right answer.
The civilians don't care much if Americans kill insurgents, as long as they only kill insurgents. You have to understand that most of the Iraqis are completely sick of the war. They don't care who's fighting whom, who's blowing up whom, they just want it done, they want us out, they want the insurgents to stop.
Unfortunately, "making nice" isn't going to help. There is only a tiny group of people who are responsible for what's happening. They have adopted religion to carry out their agenda, and the power structure of Islam (imams have the local authority to decree whatever they want) makes it pathetically easy for them to subvert it to their own ends by convincing a few crazy fundamentalist imams to follow them. They use attacks for recruitment (as you point out, if the attacks stopped recruitment would drop.) But the attacks don't stop, because the leaders of the insurgency don't want them stopped. For example, the latest rounds of bombing in Baghdad have been in markets serving all faiths; Sunnis, Shiites and Christians all died from the same bomb blast. It's pretty obvious to an outside observer that the goal isn't "kill the Shiites or kill the Sunnis"; instead it's "kill civilians to pressure America and foster more hatred." And it's also become more apparent to everyone that the insurgency has always been coming from Iran. The Iraqis have no particular desire to see their country bombed into the sixth century, but the Iranian "revolutionary guards" don't have to live there, now, do they?
People keep saying this because the PS3s were on-the-shelf available through most of the Christmas season, while Wiis were sold out on the morning of day one and continued to sell out immediately everywhere throughout the season. Nintendo could have easily sold two or three times what they did if they had the products on the shelves. Sony had their products out in the marketplace, which means they sold all they were capable of selling at their current price point.
There's still a lot of guesstimation, but the Wii is far more popular than the PS3. Not that the PS3 is dying (Sony won't let it) but it's not going to dominate the current console market.
Ours goes to 51. Yes, but you see -- that's one more, isn't it? Fifty-one is one more than fifty, that's what makes it so special. It's one more.
And I'll have you know that just because we own three small dogs (two shitzus and a tibetan terrier) doesn't mean we let them crap just anywhere and don't pick it up. It's not a size-of-the-dog issue, it's an irresponsible owner issue.
With Windows Media Player, any tracks you rip into WMA are encrypted and encumbered with a "license" by default. You have to know in advance to go into preferences and disable the "automatically protect my music with a license" switch.
Once the whole Protected Media Path thing starts visibly preventing people from ripping media, I'm hoping Vista and the Media editions will fall out of favor with the TV-entertainment center crowd.
I thought EAC was a one-button-rip tool. It certainly is if you do the set up for him and show him which one button to click :-). Sure, there's a lot of technical gobbledygook scrolling past him on the screen, but he doesn't have to look at that.
iScream! uScream! wiiAllScream for iPhones!
iQuit.
50W doesn't sound like enough power or capacity to me. In a disaster you can never have too many phone lines or ways for people to check their email. But then again I'm not the one building or paying for the equipment.
50kW might be required if he was planning on erecting a small regional broadcast transmitter, like an AM radio station. As someone else pointed out though, it would take nearly an acre of solar panels to produce that much energy. It's hardly portable, never mind the initial cost of about $800 per square meter!
Everything that's been commercially done in this arena so far has been the domain of custom high-end home automation systems. Some hobbyists have built home servers out of whatever they've had (Linux, Windows or Macs.) But no one's hit the mass market yet with the truly "all in one" home server. Microsoft's "smart home" is a cool technology demonstration, but they're still a long way from having one to install in your utility room next to your water heater.
I have no idea how this guy wants to keep his disaster gear stored. Perhaps he'll use lead acid cells with the acid stored in a separate container, filling the batteries only when required. Initially filling them may be dangerous, but they should keep indefinitely with absolutely no maintenance that way, provided the acid container does not deteriorate. Or maybe he wants to take it out and drill with it every six months, at which point he'd be much better off keeping them fully charged.
This is what I just got just now timing the receipt of data from a few pages of Slashdot and Google News. I didn't count any of the time spent navigating to the page, sending the request, or displaying the results. I strictly limited myself to measuring the incoming data rate. I stared timing when I saw the word "receiving" appear, and I stopped timing when the machine began to render the page. I then recorded the page size:
I did get one good bit of reception there at the end: over 2kbytes per second. On average, it's about 1kbyte per second. I don't know whether the pathetic performance is due to native GPRS limitations, crappy Cingular service, horrible Bluetooth on the Motorola cell phone, some combination of the above, or something else. But for me to claim I see 5kbytes per second would be a lie.But please, feel free to get a kick out of nickel and diming your customers out of existence. Your network sucks eggs compared to Verizon's, the reigning kings of petty overcharging and customer abuse. You're going to have to be a lot better than you are before you can start treating your customers as shitty as they treat theirs.
No, 10 kilobits per second, and even that may be a bit generous. As I said, it's not fast.
The Upper Midwestern states are thousands of miles from natural sources of oil, and currently rely entirely on lengthy pipelines carrying crude oil from distant ports to local refineries. A disaster wiping out that infrastructure would reduce the gasoline flow to whatever could be trucked in, and neither the trucking nor the rail industry is anywhere near ready to deliver at our current demand levels for the years it might take to rebuild pipelines and refineries.
Local sources of energy make the most sense for planning for a long-term outage. Uncharged batteries and solar panels may take a while to come on-line, but they're proven reliable and would provide a good long-term solution, (probably the most effective for the 50 watt load the poster mentions.) Distilling corn or switchgrass is certainly worth exploring as an alternative long-term fuel; or perhaps a fuel cell appliance if he has a ready source of methanol.
GPRS speed, which is another way of saying "not fast." If I had to take a WAG, I'd say it's perhaps 10 kbps.
The "Setup Devices" button in the Bluetooth preferences will automatically set up most of this stuff for me on my LifeDrive. Palm also provides a standalone "phone setup" app that will do it, too, and they update that regularly with different cell providers.
My LifeDrive is set up to have a "Network" that looks like this: User Name = WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM, Password = CINGULAR1, the connection is the one created when I paired to my Bluetooth phone (create the connection as an additional "LAN" connection, not another "Phone" connection), and the connection type is PPP. I gave it a couple static DNS providers, and let it assign an IP address.
The script is the only trick, and if your device won't set itself up automatically, this is what you would need to write:
This same Hayes dialing string has been tested and works from all those various devices through a Sony Ericsson T637, an S-E T610, and my current Motorola V3 RAZR. The last "2" in the dial sequence tells your phone which network connection it should use, and you may have to change that to a 1, 3 or whatever your phone may require. In my V3, I think that translated into what Motorola calls "Web Sessions".You can find most of this on the web, I think Cingular's site has it, too.
Of course all that nonsense goes away in June when I get my 8GB iPhone and drop kick this RAZR all the way onto eBay! :-)
Funny, I'm paying $20/month for unlimited GPRS data from Cingular. Just get the data plan on your phone. The plan doesn't care who's requesting data, whether it be the phone or the computer. You don't have to get a special "plan" for your laptop unless you're not smart enough to figure out how to interconnect them on your own.