What I see happening time and again is a company is built by engineers and visionaries, but then leadership is replaced with MBAs who understand the value of money while not fundamentally understanding the value of work. Yet they often have the arrogance (they politely call them leadership skills) to believe they understand the organizations they're leading.
Unless they have a professional background in the area they're leading, such as a former life as an engineer being in charge of IT or manufacturing, or a CPA in charge of finance, MBAs are pretty much toxic in any role. If you have an MBA leading your ranks who came from a management background, look around the cabin for the exit signs, keeping in mind that the nearest exit may be behind you.
Oh, we didn't experience all 8 failures simultaneously at 50,000 hours, either. Those failures occurred throughout the life of the deployment, not just at the tail end. They began about a year in, and failed sporadically throughout their service lifetime.
I'm very aware of MBTF and how it works across equipment populations. That's why I pointed out there were 24 drives in our set, and we had 8 failures. 24 drives x 50,000 operating hours = 1,200,000 total operating hours. Seagate's published MBTF is 1,200,000 hours (which is purely a coincidence, but very convenient for doing the math.) We experienced eight failures during a time frame when their prediction indicated we should have experienced one failure. The easy-to-compute MBTF that we actually experienced was 1,200,000/8 = 150,000 hours, not 1,200,000 hours.
I understand the basis for making estimates falls to experience with previous designs, stress testing, initial measurements, infant mortality figures from the field, and that it's still only a guess on the best of days. But to be optimistic by a factor of eight? Even salesmen don't usually lie that badly. (It's also assuming the rest of the drives would continue working for the next couple of centuries, but as we've since divested ourselves of that equipment, we'll never know.)
Aside from the impact to hardware maintenance budgets (which were borne by the service organization, not us), we were looking to minimize developer disruption by providing them with the highest possible quality equipment. Knock out a developer's hard drive and you lose a couple days worth of work out of them while they wait for the repairs and then restore their environments. It's especially slow when dealing with custom built boxes where the service organization doesn't have spare drives lying about. Those losses are far more than the extra cost of a premium drive, and is part of what we were trying to avoid.
One reason the price of games has increased is because the cost of producing games has increased. A gaming house used to be a couple dozen guys in a non-descript office building, making 8-bit chirping music and blocky characters. Today's gaming houses hire orchestras, A-list voice actors, motion capture actors, they have script writers, artistic directors, racks of artists, 3-D modelers, coders, designers, they have data centers housing rendering farms and server clusters, and they have testers, testers, and more testers. A big house can spend $10 million creating a game without breaking a sweat.
And only then do they start to spend real money like a drunken sailor. They put on an all-out marketing blitz, with TV ads, posters, movie trailers, direct mailings, online advertising, movie tie-ins, trade shows, "social media" marketing, cardboard stand-ups for comic book stores, character appearances, and alcohol-fueled reviewer shmooze-fests. They can spend $50 million or more on just the advertising alone. An example I read in HBR from a few years ago pegged ad spending at roughly 5X - 10X the game development costs.
It's all a gamble. Imagine investing $50 million in a game, and ending up with "Duke Nukem Whenever" or "Daikatana" at the end of it all - a stinker that nobody buys. Your hits have to outsell your flops, or you go out of business.
Finally, the price of games is ultimately determined by whatever the customer is willing to pay for them. If you think Crysis 3 is worth $60, buy it. If you think it's overpriced, don't buy it.
Not to be a shill or anything here, but there is a benefit that DRM brings to the end user: it keeps the prices for games more affordable, and it makes multi-million dollar games possible.
Gaming is already risky. They invest a lot in those big games, and require millions of copies to sell to break even, plus they expect to make a profit.
Let's say a hypothetical game costs $50,000,000 to create. At $50 they have to sell one million copies to break even. If they have figures showing DRM increases paid-for copies sold by 50% (in other words twice as many people buy it if they can't get it for free from a download) they would sell only 500,000 copies, and so would have to charge $100 per copy to break even. And since fewer people are willing to spend $100 per copy, the game is less likely to break even.
You can argue with me that my example numbers are bad, that customers hate DRM, that customers don't buy DRM games, that game companies profiteer from gamers and exploit programmers, and that thousands of examples of existing profitable DRM-free games all go to prove that DRM is wrong, and all that's fine and true but completely misses the point. The game companies are looking at DRM from the economic point of view, not the gamer's side of things. This is how they see it.
How you as a gamer see DRM isn't their main concern - making money is.
Because what most people still want is that feeling of communicating with other people, of being in the attention span of someone else: "Listen to me, for I am important and have this to say!" Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Slashdot, it's all about the people at the other end of the technology, and not the tech itself.
The actual tech underneath is at its most amazing when it's completely invisible. So one huge growth industry has been in shrinking existing technology. It may only be evolutionary revisions of previous ideas, but it's still really cool work.
"Hey, is this Justice T. Sheriff? Hi, Eve Mallory here. You might want to check out Alice, of 1234 Main St. I know she calls this guy Bob in Costa Rica every Wednesday at midnight, and every Thursday she gets a package. I'm not saying, I'm just saying, you know?"
I just posted it above, but here it is again. Seagate's own published reliability information shows their 7200 RPM drives fail more than twice as often as either their 5400 RPM drives or their hybrid drives, and their SSDs are even more reliable.
And why are the magical unicorns going extinct? No demand. People on a budget buy a slow drive, people who can afford slightly more buy an SSD hybrid, people who have the means and require the performance buy an expensive SSD. If Seagate saw there was a market for expensive yet still slow 7,200 RPM drives, they'd keep making them. (Actually they still do have a few, it's their corporate customers who are too large and slow to make a more rational decision.)
Sorry I wasn't clear about the reliability thing. Seagate's 5,200 RPM drives have twice the reliability when compared to their 7,200 RPM drives (the Annual Failure Rate is predicted at 0.48%[1] vs 1.065%[2]), and the difference made by adding the complexity of a cache gives them a predicted AFR of only 0.50%. And reliability is absolutely driving this: if they have to double the reliability of their 7,200 RPM drives, they will cost more than plain old SSDs (also at 0.50% AFR[1]).
They're just adding another choice that appeals to a certain segment of the market. They have cheap, reliable, and slow 5,400 RPM drives; slightly more expensive, just as reliable, and slightly faster 5,400 RPM hybrid drives; or slightly more expensive and crazy fast SSDs. 10K drives are as expensive as SSDs, yet far slower than SSDs and only slightly more reliable than the cheap 5,400 RPM drives. There's not a big value proposition for the 10K drives, and the market isn't really looking for them.
By the way, we did an analysis on a set of twenty-four enterprise class 15,000-RPM Cheetah drives installed in developer workstations. They have a published MTBF of 1,200,000 hours, yet we lost eight of the 24 drives (25%) within 50,000 hours, all suffering catastrophic failure at less than 5% of their claimed life. High speed and high price did not automatically guarantee reliability. (And their published MTBF should have been found in the "fiction" category.)
Certainly, technology producers change their designs as they go, making them cheaper and cheaper until they just barely stay within the lower end of their specs. It's called "optimization", and it's the responsible thing for a manufacturer to do for its shareholders. Same volume, same price, higher return on investment. If you don't personally like it, you can pay more for a device with better lower-end specs from someone else.
In the case of hard drives, Seagate knows that 5,400 RPM machines are far more reliable than 7,200 RPM machines, even after optimization of both. I suspect that in order to make 7,200 RPM drives more durable, the manufacturing costs exceeded that of SSDs. And if 7,200 RPM drives can't be made more reliable for an affordable price, I expect that is why Seagate is dropping them completely.
Hybrids are a way to sell a slightly faster version of the mechanical drive for people on a budget who still need reliability. No, it's not going to out-perform a 7,200 RPM drive, but over time it will do better than a 5,400 RPM drive without a cache. If you want performance, spend the extra money for a real SSD. If you want cheap speed without reliability, you'll have to buy a faster drive from someone else.
Pro tip: Your point seems less false when you don't try to pass the same URL off as three different references.:-)
BTW, I attended Chris' presentation at DEFCON 18, and while he showed us all just how quickly so many of the phones in the room believed his fake tower, he never did demonstrate the actual interception of a phone call in front of the audience. I think the FCC and FBI were chilling his effect a bit that day. That said, I don't doubt for a minute that everything he discussed was entirely possible.
If you're really interested in seeing how far the concept can be taken, search Google for "Harris Stingray", and read a few of the news articles. Let's just say that Chris is not alone in his understanding of hacking the cellular protocols.
Depends on how "off" you mean by "off". There are still a few circuits energized when the smartphone is off - obviously, the power button sense circuitry, as well as the real time clock. But most of the CPU is shut off and most other circuits are not drawing current. Certainly none of the radios are supposed to be energized. As you say, the activity of powering down circuits is partially defined by software, and software can be changed while the phone user remains none the wiser.
A-GPS actually has two modes of assistance. One is the boot-up process you mentioned where it sends a request to the nearby tower to get the current ephemeris data of the satellite constellation, and the tower quickly returns the list of satellites currently in view, enabling it to synchronize much faster than a cold start. The other form of assistance is that the phone can retransmit the received signal to the tower, and allow the tower to decode and perform the computations of location, with the assumption that the tower can improve position accuracy by acting as a sort of differential GPS (the tower is in a fixed surveyed position and can thus factor out local RF path anomalies due to weather.) But that was an old requirement, and since modern GPS chipsets do all their own decoding internally, I don't know if it's needed anymore. Actually retransmitting the GPS signal would use more battery energy than it would take an on board chip to decode it, which is why I doubt it's being done as a time or energy saving measure.
However, the cellular network does want phone location information for a reason other than E-911: signal quality. If they are receiving reports of dead zones or dropped calls, they have real data they can observe instead of just a bunch of inaccurate customer complaints.
What I don't know is if GPS derived location information is ever used by the cellular network for handoff, or if that remains a function of the handset signal strength.
Of course it could carry the pesticide, but this aircraft is not designed for that. Lose the weight of one of the pilots, lose the weight of most of the batteries, and it would have plenty of lift capacity to haul several hundred pounds of payload.
There's a different issue, though, and that is if a 208 foot wingspan plane is practical for dusting a field, and the answer is obviously no. But the same technology could be used in a smaller aircraft that carries a 40 pound sack of dust, and autonomously piloted in a pattern over a field. Such autopilot systems are in common use today in farm tractors for planting, weeding, and harvesting crops, and hold a line with better than 10 cm accuracy. There is no technical reason they couldn't pilot an unmanned pesticide drone accurately over a field. If 40 pounds covers 40 acres, and it takes 16 separate refill flights to cover a square mile, so what? You don't have to pay an autopilot overtime, and you don't even have to buy this one fuel. One ground operator could probably keep four drones refilled and aloft, and if you automated and optimized the refilling process he could probably keep eight or more going at once.
An ocean full of salt water is a somewhat different environment than the confines of a bathtub, a toaster, and a victim. I'm guessing that if someone breaches the inner aluminum waterproofing shield, the conductivity of the salt water probably popped whatever circuit protection they have, shutting down the power.
If you're somewhat interested, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable has a good description of the materials making up the cables. And if you're really into it, Neal Stephenson wrote a brilliant story on the laying of the SEA-ME-WE-3 cable network, which you can still read on Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html . It's one of the most fascinating looks I've read into a world I use daily but will probably never see. I can't recommend it highly enough.
But really, this was just meant to be a pun referring to the GPs use of the word 'shock'.
Fiber has a kevlar sheating which should worth something.
Worth what, exactly? The stuff is woven about the plastic sheathed glass fibers, some insulated copper wires that carry power to the repeaters, and encased in a waterproof coating. If you cut it open and empty the useless crap out you'll destroy the integrity of the fibers. It's not like you can knit yourself a bulletproof Kevlar sweater out of it.
The copper will be worth a few farthings per furlong, but that's likely to be it for value.
Traffic accidents are not one-in-a-billion event. Last year there were over 10,000,000 in the US, and that rate has been steady for 20 years. You certainly could need that footage someday for a very practical reason.
Even the meteor strike shouldn't be counted that way. Spectacular natural phenomena occur all the time.
So let me get this straight: you're reasonable and polite to the phone company representatives and they eventually solve your problems? Funny, I'm reasonable and polite to my phone company representatives, too, and they solve my problems for me as well. What a remarkable coincidence!
For those of you who haven't tried being nice to people whose job is to help you, there are some simple things you can do to make the experience as smooth and successful as possible. First, and most important, remember your "please" and "thank you"s. Make note of the operator's name, and use it once or twice during the call: "Hi Shelly, I appreciate your taking care of this for me now because I really can't afford to be without my phone this afternoon." If you don't catch their name, addressing them as "sir" or "ma'am" is always appropriate. Remain calm: don't raise your voice, never threaten them, and don't 'demand' anything that you 'deserve'. Asking for their help is the key, and be willing to provide whatever they ask. If they want you to follow the script and do the replace-the-battery-dance, follow the script. It's generally faster than arguing that you know what you're doing - even when you know what you're doing, if it's not a path on their script, they generally won't do as well in assisting you.
To avoid starting from a point of frustration, I recommend learning how to speed-navigate through their IVR system to quickly end up at a human. I know it's hard to remain positive after spending five minutes wading through the "dial 7 for technical support *beep* dial 8 to rename the account holder for pre-paid billing premium SMS issues *beep* " menus.
Does it take longer to be helpful and polite, or is it faster and more effective to be an arrogant, demanding ass? Well, I almost never have to call back and argue a second or third time, or get them to put their "superior" on the phone; so I don't waste a lot of time or elevate my blood pressure with the hassles. And sometimes I get those random "upgrade fees" or "change fees" waived as a "thank you for being so patient." Just last month they waived a $35 fee on a phone upgrade because I was nice and polite. I doubt they would have waived the fees if I was being a dick about it.
OK, there are two paths to reconsider. First, we could lock them up for a shorter period of time, saving the ongoing costs of longer incarceration, but incurring the costs of additional recidivism, (harm to the public, capture, trials, and future incarceration) which we know will be at least 62.5% of them. Or we could lock them up for longer periods of time, reducing their ability to re-offend, and saving the costs of extra offenses, which would include public harm, capture, and trials.
Of the two strategies, the second seems better backed by numbers. The sharp dip in the crime rate from the later 1990s through the 2000s is thought to be due to much longer sentences being handed down to violent criminals starting in the late 1980s-early 1990s. Incarceration costs are up, but public harm is down. Spend money, get benefit.
The third option is to try to keep people (kids, mostly) from getting into trouble in the first place. I agree this is the best choice, but it has a 50 year return on investment, and teen programs rarely get politicians much positive traction. They get much better election results from being 'tough on crime' instead of being 'smart on kids'.
Or are you still believing there's a fourth option, in which we gently talk the prisoners into never reoffending, and somehow magically rehabilitating them through the use of winged monkeys and invisible pink unicorns? Because that's worked out so well.
Does that particular bias matter? Are you thinking they're detecting "stupidity" or "carelessness" instead of "criminal tendencies"? The end result doesn't have to explain the path, although it's nice when it does.
What I think might be more interesting in is the nature of the crime vs. the mapping of activity. Are they violent criminals? Drug offenders? Insider traders? Political dissidents? I should think that each would have a different type of response: drug offenders might be react due to addiction; violent offenders might have poor impulse control which could show up in a different area of the brain; political dissidents would have the internal smug certainty of being "right" regarding their "just" cause; while insider traders could just be scheming bastards. The selection process might only work on one category of offender; or perhaps would need to be tailored to fit either the crime or the individual.
Slashdot Mirror
What I see happening time and again is a company is built by engineers and visionaries, but then leadership is replaced with MBAs who understand the value of money while not fundamentally understanding the value of work. Yet they often have the arrogance (they politely call them leadership skills) to believe they understand the organizations they're leading.
Unless they have a professional background in the area they're leading, such as a former life as an engineer being in charge of IT or manufacturing, or a CPA in charge of finance, MBAs are pretty much toxic in any role. If you have an MBA leading your ranks who came from a management background, look around the cabin for the exit signs, keeping in mind that the nearest exit may be behind you.
Thanks, I missed that!
Oh, we didn't experience all 8 failures simultaneously at 50,000 hours, either. Those failures occurred throughout the life of the deployment, not just at the tail end. They began about a year in, and failed sporadically throughout their service lifetime.
I'm very aware of MBTF and how it works across equipment populations. That's why I pointed out there were 24 drives in our set, and we had 8 failures. 24 drives x 50,000 operating hours = 1,200,000 total operating hours. Seagate's published MBTF is 1,200,000 hours (which is purely a coincidence, but very convenient for doing the math.) We experienced eight failures during a time frame when their prediction indicated we should have experienced one failure. The easy-to-compute MBTF that we actually experienced was 1,200,000/8 = 150,000 hours, not 1,200,000 hours.
I understand the basis for making estimates falls to experience with previous designs, stress testing, initial measurements, infant mortality figures from the field, and that it's still only a guess on the best of days. But to be optimistic by a factor of eight? Even salesmen don't usually lie that badly. (It's also assuming the rest of the drives would continue working for the next couple of centuries, but as we've since divested ourselves of that equipment, we'll never know.)
Aside from the impact to hardware maintenance budgets (which were borne by the service organization, not us), we were looking to minimize developer disruption by providing them with the highest possible quality equipment. Knock out a developer's hard drive and you lose a couple days worth of work out of them while they wait for the repairs and then restore their environments. It's especially slow when dealing with custom built boxes where the service organization doesn't have spare drives lying about. Those losses are far more than the extra cost of a premium drive, and is part of what we were trying to avoid.
That's my point. I have to show no evidence whatsoever. The gaming houses simply believe it is true, therefore they keep insisting upon DRM.
What you wish, what I wish, none of that figures into their equations.
One reason the price of games has increased is because the cost of producing games has increased. A gaming house used to be a couple dozen guys in a non-descript office building, making 8-bit chirping music and blocky characters. Today's gaming houses hire orchestras, A-list voice actors, motion capture actors, they have script writers, artistic directors, racks of artists, 3-D modelers, coders, designers, they have data centers housing rendering farms and server clusters, and they have testers, testers, and more testers. A big house can spend $10 million creating a game without breaking a sweat.
And only then do they start to spend real money like a drunken sailor. They put on an all-out marketing blitz, with TV ads, posters, movie trailers, direct mailings, online advertising, movie tie-ins, trade shows, "social media" marketing, cardboard stand-ups for comic book stores, character appearances, and alcohol-fueled reviewer shmooze-fests. They can spend $50 million or more on just the advertising alone. An example I read in HBR from a few years ago pegged ad spending at roughly 5X - 10X the game development costs.
It's all a gamble. Imagine investing $50 million in a game, and ending up with "Duke Nukem Whenever" or "Daikatana" at the end of it all - a stinker that nobody buys. Your hits have to outsell your flops, or you go out of business.
Finally, the price of games is ultimately determined by whatever the customer is willing to pay for them. If you think Crysis 3 is worth $60, buy it. If you think it's overpriced, don't buy it.
Good point. I should have said it this way:
If they believe that DRM increases paid-for copies sold by 50%
Because that's what they believe. Supported by facts or not, that's what the whole DRM situation boils down to.
Not to be a shill or anything here, but there is a benefit that DRM brings to the end user: it keeps the prices for games more affordable, and it makes multi-million dollar games possible.
Gaming is already risky. They invest a lot in those big games, and require millions of copies to sell to break even, plus they expect to make a profit.
Let's say a hypothetical game costs $50,000,000 to create. At $50 they have to sell one million copies to break even. If they have figures showing DRM increases paid-for copies sold by 50% (in other words twice as many people buy it if they can't get it for free from a download) they would sell only 500,000 copies, and so would have to charge $100 per copy to break even. And since fewer people are willing to spend $100 per copy, the game is less likely to break even.
You can argue with me that my example numbers are bad, that customers hate DRM, that customers don't buy DRM games, that game companies profiteer from gamers and exploit programmers, and that thousands of examples of existing profitable DRM-free games all go to prove that DRM is wrong, and all that's fine and true but completely misses the point. The game companies are looking at DRM from the economic point of view, not the gamer's side of things. This is how they see it.
How you as a gamer see DRM isn't their main concern - making money is.
Because what most people still want is that feeling of communicating with other people, of being in the attention span of someone else: "Listen to me, for I am important and have this to say!" Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Slashdot, it's all about the people at the other end of the technology, and not the tech itself.
The actual tech underneath is at its most amazing when it's completely invisible. So one huge growth industry has been in shrinking existing technology. It may only be evolutionary revisions of previous ideas, but it's still really cool work.
"Hey, is this Justice T. Sheriff? Hi, Eve Mallory here. You might want to check out Alice, of 1234 Main St. I know she calls this guy Bob in Costa Rica every Wednesday at midnight, and every Thursday she gets a package. I'm not saying, I'm just saying, you know?"
I just posted it above, but here it is again. Seagate's own published reliability information shows their 7200 RPM drives fail more than twice as often as either their 5400 RPM drives or their hybrid drives, and their SSDs are even more reliable.
Seagate's 5400 RPM and 5400 RPM hybrid drives fail annually at 0.48% and 0.50% respectively.
Their Pulsar SSD drives have an AFR of 0.44%
Their 7200 RPM 'enterprise value' drives have an AFR of 1.065%
And why are the magical unicorns going extinct? No demand. People on a budget buy a slow drive, people who can afford slightly more buy an SSD hybrid, people who have the means and require the performance buy an expensive SSD. If Seagate saw there was a market for expensive yet still slow 7,200 RPM drives, they'd keep making them. (Actually they still do have a few, it's their corporate customers who are too large and slow to make a more rational decision.)
Sorry I wasn't clear about the reliability thing. Seagate's 5,200 RPM drives have twice the reliability when compared to their 7,200 RPM drives (the Annual Failure Rate is predicted at 0.48%[1] vs 1.065%[2]), and the difference made by adding the complexity of a cache gives them a predicted AFR of only 0.50%. And reliability is absolutely driving this: if they have to double the reliability of their 7,200 RPM drives, they will cost more than plain old SSDs (also at 0.50% AFR[1]).
[1] http://origin-www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/
[2] http://origin-www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/hdd/enterprise-value-hdd/
They're just adding another choice that appeals to a certain segment of the market. They have cheap, reliable, and slow 5,400 RPM drives; slightly more expensive, just as reliable, and slightly faster 5,400 RPM hybrid drives; or slightly more expensive and crazy fast SSDs. 10K drives are as expensive as SSDs, yet far slower than SSDs and only slightly more reliable than the cheap 5,400 RPM drives. There's not a big value proposition for the 10K drives, and the market isn't really looking for them.
By the way, we did an analysis on a set of twenty-four enterprise class 15,000-RPM Cheetah drives installed in developer workstations. They have a published MTBF of 1,200,000 hours, yet we lost eight of the 24 drives (25%) within 50,000 hours, all suffering catastrophic failure at less than 5% of their claimed life. High speed and high price did not automatically guarantee reliability. (And their published MTBF should have been found in the "fiction" category.)
Certainly, technology producers change their designs as they go, making them cheaper and cheaper until they just barely stay within the lower end of their specs. It's called "optimization", and it's the responsible thing for a manufacturer to do for its shareholders. Same volume, same price, higher return on investment. If you don't personally like it, you can pay more for a device with better lower-end specs from someone else.
In the case of hard drives, Seagate knows that 5,400 RPM machines are far more reliable than 7,200 RPM machines, even after optimization of both. I suspect that in order to make 7,200 RPM drives more durable, the manufacturing costs exceeded that of SSDs. And if 7,200 RPM drives can't be made more reliable for an affordable price, I expect that is why Seagate is dropping them completely.
Hybrids are a way to sell a slightly faster version of the mechanical drive for people on a budget who still need reliability. No, it's not going to out-perform a 7,200 RPM drive, but over time it will do better than a 5,400 RPM drive without a cache. If you want performance, spend the extra money for a real SSD. If you want cheap speed without reliability, you'll have to buy a faster drive from someone else.
Pro tip: Your point seems less false when you don't try to pass the same URL off as three different references. :-)
BTW, I attended Chris' presentation at DEFCON 18, and while he showed us all just how quickly so many of the phones in the room believed his fake tower, he never did demonstrate the actual interception of a phone call in front of the audience. I think the FCC and FBI were chilling his effect a bit that day. That said, I don't doubt for a minute that everything he discussed was entirely possible.
If you're really interested in seeing how far the concept can be taken, search Google for "Harris Stingray", and read a few of the news articles. Let's just say that Chris is not alone in his understanding of hacking the cellular protocols.
Depends on how "off" you mean by "off". There are still a few circuits energized when the smartphone is off - obviously, the power button sense circuitry, as well as the real time clock. But most of the CPU is shut off and most other circuits are not drawing current. Certainly none of the radios are supposed to be energized. As you say, the activity of powering down circuits is partially defined by software, and software can be changed while the phone user remains none the wiser.
A-GPS actually has two modes of assistance. One is the boot-up process you mentioned where it sends a request to the nearby tower to get the current ephemeris data of the satellite constellation, and the tower quickly returns the list of satellites currently in view, enabling it to synchronize much faster than a cold start. The other form of assistance is that the phone can retransmit the received signal to the tower, and allow the tower to decode and perform the computations of location, with the assumption that the tower can improve position accuracy by acting as a sort of differential GPS (the tower is in a fixed surveyed position and can thus factor out local RF path anomalies due to weather.) But that was an old requirement, and since modern GPS chipsets do all their own decoding internally, I don't know if it's needed anymore. Actually retransmitting the GPS signal would use more battery energy than it would take an on board chip to decode it, which is why I doubt it's being done as a time or energy saving measure.
However, the cellular network does want phone location information for a reason other than E-911: signal quality. If they are receiving reports of dead zones or dropped calls, they have real data they can observe instead of just a bunch of inaccurate customer complaints.
What I don't know is if GPS derived location information is ever used by the cellular network for handoff, or if that remains a function of the handset signal strength.
Of course it could carry the pesticide, but this aircraft is not designed for that. Lose the weight of one of the pilots, lose the weight of most of the batteries, and it would have plenty of lift capacity to haul several hundred pounds of payload.
There's a different issue, though, and that is if a 208 foot wingspan plane is practical for dusting a field, and the answer is obviously no. But the same technology could be used in a smaller aircraft that carries a 40 pound sack of dust, and autonomously piloted in a pattern over a field. Such autopilot systems are in common use today in farm tractors for planting, weeding, and harvesting crops, and hold a line with better than 10 cm accuracy. There is no technical reason they couldn't pilot an unmanned pesticide drone accurately over a field. If 40 pounds covers 40 acres, and it takes 16 separate refill flights to cover a square mile, so what? You don't have to pay an autopilot overtime, and you don't even have to buy this one fuel. One ground operator could probably keep four drones refilled and aloft, and if you automated and optimized the refilling process he could probably keep eight or more going at once.
An ocean full of salt water is a somewhat different environment than the confines of a bathtub, a toaster, and a victim. I'm guessing that if someone breaches the inner aluminum waterproofing shield, the conductivity of the salt water probably popped whatever circuit protection they have, shutting down the power.
If you're somewhat interested, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable has a good description of the materials making up the cables. And if you're really into it, Neal Stephenson wrote a brilliant story on the laying of the SEA-ME-WE-3 cable network, which you can still read on Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html . It's one of the most fascinating looks I've read into a world I use daily but will probably never see. I can't recommend it highly enough.
But really, this was just meant to be a pun referring to the GPs use of the word 'shock'.
It still has a copper conductor carrying 7kV, used to power the undersea signal repeaters.
You can, however, imagine their shock when the saboteurs encountered the 7000 volts.
Well then you better come up with BeeDRM and protect yourselves then.
Or maybe you should just start using bcrypt.
Fiber has a kevlar sheating which should worth something.
Worth what, exactly? The stuff is woven about the plastic sheathed glass fibers, some insulated copper wires that carry power to the repeaters, and encased in a waterproof coating. If you cut it open and empty the useless crap out you'll destroy the integrity of the fibers. It's not like you can knit yourself a bulletproof Kevlar sweater out of it.
The copper will be worth a few farthings per furlong, but that's likely to be it for value.
Traffic accidents are not one-in-a-billion event. Last year there were over 10,000,000 in the US, and that rate has been steady for 20 years. You certainly could need that footage someday for a very practical reason.
Even the meteor strike shouldn't be counted that way. Spectacular natural phenomena occur all the time.
So let me get this straight: you're reasonable and polite to the phone company representatives and they eventually solve your problems? Funny, I'm reasonable and polite to my phone company representatives, too, and they solve my problems for me as well. What a remarkable coincidence!
For those of you who haven't tried being nice to people whose job is to help you, there are some simple things you can do to make the experience as smooth and successful as possible. First, and most important, remember your "please" and "thank you"s. Make note of the operator's name, and use it once or twice during the call: "Hi Shelly, I appreciate your taking care of this for me now because I really can't afford to be without my phone this afternoon." If you don't catch their name, addressing them as "sir" or "ma'am" is always appropriate. Remain calm: don't raise your voice, never threaten them, and don't 'demand' anything that you 'deserve'. Asking for their help is the key, and be willing to provide whatever they ask. If they want you to follow the script and do the replace-the-battery-dance, follow the script. It's generally faster than arguing that you know what you're doing - even when you know what you're doing, if it's not a path on their script, they generally won't do as well in assisting you.
To avoid starting from a point of frustration, I recommend learning how to speed-navigate through their IVR system to quickly end up at a human. I know it's hard to remain positive after spending five minutes wading through the "dial 7 for technical support *beep* dial 8 to rename the account holder for pre-paid billing premium SMS issues *beep* " menus.
Does it take longer to be helpful and polite, or is it faster and more effective to be an arrogant, demanding ass? Well, I almost never have to call back and argue a second or third time, or get them to put their "superior" on the phone; so I don't waste a lot of time or elevate my blood pressure with the hassles. And sometimes I get those random "upgrade fees" or "change fees" waived as a "thank you for being so patient." Just last month they waived a $35 fee on a phone upgrade because I was nice and polite. I doubt they would have waived the fees if I was being a dick about it.
OK, there are two paths to reconsider. First, we could lock them up for a shorter period of time, saving the ongoing costs of longer incarceration, but incurring the costs of additional recidivism, (harm to the public, capture, trials, and future incarceration) which we know will be at least 62.5% of them. Or we could lock them up for longer periods of time, reducing their ability to re-offend, and saving the costs of extra offenses, which would include public harm, capture, and trials.
Of the two strategies, the second seems better backed by numbers. The sharp dip in the crime rate from the later 1990s through the 2000s is thought to be due to much longer sentences being handed down to violent criminals starting in the late 1980s-early 1990s. Incarceration costs are up, but public harm is down. Spend money, get benefit.
The third option is to try to keep people (kids, mostly) from getting into trouble in the first place. I agree this is the best choice, but it has a 50 year return on investment, and teen programs rarely get politicians much positive traction. They get much better election results from being 'tough on crime' instead of being 'smart on kids'.
Or are you still believing there's a fourth option, in which we gently talk the prisoners into never reoffending, and somehow magically rehabilitating them through the use of winged monkeys and invisible pink unicorns? Because that's worked out so well.
Does that particular bias matter? Are you thinking they're detecting "stupidity" or "carelessness" instead of "criminal tendencies"? The end result doesn't have to explain the path, although it's nice when it does.
What I think might be more interesting in is the nature of the crime vs. the mapping of activity. Are they violent criminals? Drug offenders? Insider traders? Political dissidents? I should think that each would have a different type of response: drug offenders might be react due to addiction; violent offenders might have poor impulse control which could show up in a different area of the brain; political dissidents would have the internal smug certainty of being "right" regarding their "just" cause; while insider traders could just be scheming bastards. The selection process might only work on one category of offender; or perhaps would need to be tailored to fit either the crime or the individual.