yup. Books in the home is another interesting metric.
Steven Levy addressed this in his book "Freakonomics". He found that although "books in the home" is correlated with better performance in school, once you correct for the IQ of the parents, it actually makes no difference at all.
People come up with a lot of "theory of the day" explanations for improving education, but the biggest determinants of a child's performance are the IQ of the biological parents, and their birth weight. Instead of spending billions on the schools, maybe we should first spend 0.001% of that on folic acid supplements for pregnant women, and encouraging breast feeding. It would make a bigger difference.
Hmm, I just wanted to say I found your point and the GP's point to be particularly interesting. I consider myself to be on the upper end of the intellectual bell curve, though far from a genius or savant. I read the point about books and thought, "Wow, I grew up in a home full of technical books. Computers, programming, science, mathematics, engineering, I found them all to be utterly fascinating, even when I was too young to understand 90% of their contents. That really did help me develop an appreciation for learning and knowledge."
I then read your post, and I realized that my father is extremely intelligent, I was breast fed, and I was a huge, fat 9 lb baby carried to full term (Sorry, Mom). I wonder if you still get the full benefits of "good pedigree," even if the culture of learning isn't facilitated or cultivated.
You've got your technologies confused. The back-scatter-type body scanners utilize x-ray back scatter, and I think we can all agree that x-rays are ionizing radiation with known biological effects. Sure, they levels may be very low, but repeated low-level exposure to ionizing radiation can be dangerous, and it's not so simple as just dismissing it as non-ionizing radiation.
The other type of scanner are terahertz millimeter-wave scanners. While not technically ionizing, terahertz radiation is much more energetic than UHF microwaves, and the jury is still out on their exact biological effects.
Note that I said AT LEAST once a year. Obviously there is a wide range of service intervals, as there is a wide range of types of race engines. On one end, midget cars may go multiple seasons without requiring a rebuild. At the other extreme, top fuel dragster engines are rebuilt literally every single time they are run. They could end up being rebuilt several times in a single day.
Re:The Great Ethanol Scam
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This is the case for ANY motor not specifically designed to run on high-ethanol-content fuels. Ethanol is a strong solvent and strips oil films, breaks down hoses and seals, oxidizes ferrous metals, and generally tears apart gasoline motors. E85 "flex-fuel" motors are designed with ethanol's nastiness in mind, using different materials and lubricants, but even then, running E85 is harder on the engine and usually calls for more frequent service intervals.
Running E85 in ANY engine that does not explicitly state that it is designed to run on E85 will cause permanent and rapid damage. It'll probably completely destroy the engine before your next oil change.
Ethanol is complete crap as an engine fuel, with the lone exception being purpose built race engines that can utilize the higher detonation resistance for more horsepower per unit displacement. And those race motors tend to get rebuilt at least once a year, mitigating the wear factors.
I'm not complaining. Anyone insane enough to visit Iran who is NOT a spy merits execution for being stupid. If the "relatives" want to emigrate he doesn't need to visit them, and if they don't they aren't worth visiting.
I know, right? I mean it's not like thousands of Iranian-American immigrants and their US-Born children enter Iran every year to visit their extended family members. That's almost as absurd as those people returning safely to American soil and making the trip multiple times! I mean, if my 80 year old grandmother doesn't want to emigrate to the US, well then, fuck her terrorist ass, right? Next thing you know, people will be claiming that Iranian law allows the US-born children of Iranian citizens to freely enter the country! LOL!
It's the complete reverse in the rest of America, too. Everyone else is pushing for online payment and electronic billing because it saves on paper and postage costs.
Verizon is the first company I've seen try to pull an asshat move like this. I think why Verizon is trying it now involves a couple things. For one, large telecoms like Verizon and AT&T have for years felt entitled to licenses to print money hand over fist, and whenever revenue drops due to market changes or technological development, their biggest priority is to find somewhere else to recoup that lost revenue. My guess here is that Verizon noticed that a majority of their customers were already paying their bills online, so they decided to start charging a fee to do it, knowing that their customer base already appreciates the convenience of online bill payment and inertia would prevent them from paying by mail. Other service providers, public utilities for example, likely have much older, entrenched, and less 'tech-savvy' customers so they need to provide incentives to move towards online billing and its associated cost savings.
I wasn't looking for pity, I was just trying to provide a dose of perspective. Supporting or taking part of the OWS protests does not automatically make you a whining leftist, nor even significantly increase the probability that you ARE a whining leftist. There are plenty of productive, hard-working people that are pissed off too.
1) Considering you say you "spent 2 years serving my country, 6 of them getting shot in Kandahar" I'm going to guess your math skills might be why had trouble finding a job.
Sorry, that was a typo. It should read "6 months of them"
2) You relocated to DC Metro...for why? Lowest unemployment not quite - US average 9.1%, Washington DC is 10.9%. Assuming you meant Arlington, etc sure, the unemployment rates are low, but there are a lot of reasons for that that have nothing to do with availability of jobs - could be that it's so damn expensive, the unemployed are forced out quickly. Personally, considering how easy the internet has made wide-ranging search and communication, the idea of moving to a place and THEN expecting to find a job there is fairly retarded.
I relocated when I received a job offer, which happened to be only a few hours away. My job search was nationwide, and relocation was pretty much inevitable as I attended a rural and remote campus. And I used the term "DC Metro area" which would imply, yes, I did mean "Arlington, etc." The DC-MD-VA Metropolitan Statistical Area has an unemployment rate of 6.1, well below the national average.
Those are pretty damn good salaries. I don't give a flying shit what your peers were offered 5 years and a different economy ago, and honestly, it shouldn't matter to you unless your main goal is self-pity.
My whole point was the fact that the economy is totally different, I'm not interested in pity. I'm thankful to have a job that affords me a comfortable standard of living. But that doesn't diminish the fact that over the last 5 years, wages have shrunk while inflation has barely slowed. Look back further, and real wages have been dropping for decades.
4) I don't disagree with you about the bullshit bailouts. So why are you protesting Wall Street? We have elected representatives and big fat books of laws that were supposed to be regulating this. You're protesting wolves being wolves, when the guys we elected to watch the wolves are either entirely asleep (or worse, mating with them). Point your anger at the problem.
It's not about "protesting Wall Street." Protesting on Wall Street is a symbolic gesture, but the anger is directed at politicians more concerned about campaign donations and lobbyist bribes from the financial sector than the interest of the American middle class. The wolves were able to eat the sheep because the shepherd was more interested in the stripper that the wolves hired than watching his flock.
Watching OWS protests, where we have largely a population of educated middle-class or higher kids (who are staggeringly wealthy by any world standard), who have spent their lives: - getting everything they need, and pretty much everything they want - have never known hunger - have always been basically healthy - have never seen war except as volunteers, which is pretty damn unlikely anyway (more importantly, have never faced the ravage of war across their homes)
I recently graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, easily one of the most "Useful and Marketable" undergraduate degrees you can have. I am also a veteran who spent 2 years serving his country, 6 of them getting shot at in Kandahar. I have relocated to the DC-Metro area, one of the areas of lowest unemployment in the country. I BARELY found a job, and at a significantly lower salary than what my peers were being offered in 2007. My tuition costs more than doubled while I was in school. All the while, we've been dumping trillions of dollars to cover the asses of bankers and insurers underwriting ridiculous risks in order to make a quick buck.
But sure, OWS is a bunch of whining leftist hippies. Seriously dude, get fucked.
I really resent this pervasive attitude that anyone who complains about being saddled with student loans is some kind of jobless hippie with a philosophy degree and a total lack of judgement.
I studied Electrical Engineering at an in-state public university. For 3.5 years of my student career I was on a "full" ROTC scholarship. I worked full-time every summer, and spent the last several semesters of school working 25 hours a week. When I wasn't able to complete the ROTC program and commission as an officer, I was called up for 2 years in my enlisted grade, 6 months of which I spent getting shot at in Kandahar, and upon my return to school to finish my degree, I had 80% eligibility for the GI Bill. I shouldn't have any student loans, right? Except I managed to rack up about $45k in student debt after all the interest capitalization.
How, you ask? Well for one, the "full" ROTC scholarship only covers tuition and fees, but not room and board. Which was actually more than half of the cost of college for the 3 years or so. I was required to be part of a full-time, on campus senior military college, and thus on-campus room and board was not an optional cost. I got jack-diddly squat from my parents, since my father had managed to bury himself under ill-advised consumer debt. I also got nothing in Federal aid beyond minimal, unsubsidized stafford loans since my father, despite being debt-poor, had a high income on paper. Tuition and fees alone, during my time as a student increased from about $2200/semester as a freshman in 2003 to about $4000/semester in Spring 2011. And let's not forget the costs of books, software, computers, equipment for labs, etc.
Thankfully, I was able to relatively quickly find a decent paying job, which in this economic climate is difficult even with a BS in Electrical Engineering. However, my finances still feel the drag of tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. This is money I could be spending, that my home state could be collecting sales tax on.
But I guess it's a waste of tax payer dollars to make higher education affordable. After all, anyone with $50k in student loan debt is obviously a lazy, liberal hippie wasting their time pursuing a worthless degree and will never contribute anything to economic growth.
Huh? Is malaria infection a big problem with European cattle? Is there some other disease ravaging European cattle herds that could easily be prevented with a vaccine that isn't used?
I don't quite understand what point you are trying to get across. Could you clarify?
I am mostly cutting and pasting from a reply to a post I made earlier in this thread, but signal strength is only one of many factors they care to measure. In addition the numerous variables that affect any NLOS radio system, LTE adds MIMO techniques, which means you also have to care about the spatial correlation in your multi-antenna set up and how it varies with other conditions and your location. Also, MIMO relies on some rather sophisticated digital signal processing, and the implementation of this processing is left up to the individual device manufacturer and thus its performance will vary among not just RF conditions, but among different devices. Throw in the fact that LTE has no in-built capability for voice calls, and now you have a slew of devices that have to fall back to the CDMA2000 network to make or receive a phone call.
Looking at the setup as described in the article, I really doubt it's terribly interested in signal strength at all. All you need for that is a single radio on a single antenna, paired with a GPS receiver. But in these setups, they're collecting data through several different consumer handsets and devices, so I think they are more interested in evaluating their performance and behavior under less-than-ideal RF conditions. They're interested in how the devices perform handovers, fall backs, how their MIMO implementations handle various real-world conditions, and generally how nicely they devices play with their network.
First of all, signal strength is only one of many factors they care to measure. In addition the numerous variables that affect any NLOS radio system, LTE adds MIMO techniques, which means you also have to care about the spatial correlation in your multi-antenna set up and how it varies with other conditions and your location. Also, MIMO relies on some rather sophisticated digital signal processing, and the implementation of this processing is left up to the individual device manufacturer and thus its performance will vary among not just RF conditions, but among different devices. Throw in the fact that LTE has no in-built capability for voice calls, and now you have a slew of devices that have to fall back to the CDMA2000 network to make or receive a phone call.
Looking at the setup as described in the article, I really doubt it's terribly interested in signal strength at all. They're collecting data through several different consumer handsets and devices, so I think they are more interested in evaluating their performance and behavior under less-than-ideal RF conditions. They're interested in how the devices perform handovers, fall backs, how their MIMO implementations handle various real-world conditions, and generally how nicely they devices play with their network.
Frankly, I see several of the candidates promising to reduce government spending and I only see a few that are wearing religion on their sleeves. Romney is not one of them - in fact, any time he is asked about his religion he side steps the question. That topic has been hashed over plenty by Huckabee in 2008.
You only see a few that wear religion on their sleeves? Romney and Ron Paul may not do it, but pretty much every other candidate does. Perry, Gingrich, Bachmann, Palin, and Cain are all theocratic lunatics. Hell, Romney's biggest challenger to date, Perry, stared his campaign with a fucking prayer rally.
CDMA is a multiplexing/multiple access technique. GSM is a standard (and a rather old one at that). UMTS/HSPA, though they use SIM cards and were developed by the same standards body as, and somewhat backwards compatible with, GSM, they are not GSM. GSM is a 2G standard like cdmaOne. UMTS is a 3G standard like CDMA2000 (the actual standard that Sprint and Verizon use).
Good thing someone actually recognized the technical merit of CDMA though, because UMTS/HSPA ditched the TDMA scheme used in GSM for a CDMA-based scheme.
They may stop pushing WiMax, but the article makes no mention of repurposing the 2500Mhz band that spring/clearwire use for WiMax. The only thing I've seen about anything being turned off is their legacy iDEN equipment, the spectrum for which they will use for LTE rollouts. I haven't seen any indication that Sprint plans to turn off their 2500Mhz WiMax, or deploy LTE on that spectrum.
This article is about Sprint rolling out an LTE network, and in case you didn't know, LTE is basically state-of-the-art in mobile access technologies. Of standards on the horizon, only LTE-Advanced is superior, but the standards for it aren't even finalized. There won't be any LTE-Advanced products for a few years.
The US carriers have been lagging europe and asia for a while, but they can catch up very quickly with LTE rollouts since there really isn't anything better than LTE right now. And once LTE-Advanced is finished, it's basically just a software upgrade to existing LTE infrastructure.
We've had 4G here now for over a year. (Real 4G, not the 3G+ that I heard some providers in the US has been marketing as "4G")
No you haven't. "Real" 4G as defined by the ITU doesn't actually exist yet. You may have LTE networks, but they're Rel 8 or Rel 9 stuff. As far as LTE goes, only LTE-Advanced is "real" 4G, and the standards for LTE-Advanced haven't even been finalized yet, let alone any commercial products available that support it.
One could speculate that the reason why they got out of the (volatile) consumer market is that they are betting their money on memristors. Why make and market a few devices when you have a monopoly on parts that will go into everyone else's?
But if this were the case, why would they fail to make a visible statement about their memristor business either before or at the same time that they announce their abandonment of the consumer electronics market? It's one thing to say "Hey, we're radically changing our business model, but it's because we've got this great new product that is basically a license to print money," and completely another thing to say, "Oh hey, we're giving up on everything we've been doing for the past decade because it's low margin" with no explanation why.
Slight clarification/correction: WCDMA itself is NOT a general term for wideband CDMA techniques, it is a specific implementation of code-division unique to the 3G UMTS standards.
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yup. Books in the home is another interesting metric.
Steven Levy addressed this in his book "Freakonomics". He found that although "books in the home" is correlated with better performance in school, once you correct for the IQ of the parents, it actually makes no difference at all.
People come up with a lot of "theory of the day" explanations for improving education, but the biggest determinants of a child's performance are the IQ of the biological parents, and their birth weight. Instead of spending billions on the schools, maybe we should first spend 0.001% of that on folic acid supplements for pregnant women, and encouraging breast feeding. It would make a bigger difference.
Hmm, I just wanted to say I found your point and the GP's point to be particularly interesting. I consider myself to be on the upper end of the intellectual bell curve, though far from a genius or savant. I read the point about books and thought, "Wow, I grew up in a home full of technical books. Computers, programming, science, mathematics, engineering, I found them all to be utterly fascinating, even when I was too young to understand 90% of their contents. That really did help me develop an appreciation for learning and knowledge."
I then read your post, and I realized that my father is extremely intelligent, I was breast fed, and I was a huge, fat 9 lb baby carried to full term (Sorry, Mom). I wonder if you still get the full benefits of "good pedigree," even if the culture of learning isn't facilitated or cultivated.
You've got your technologies confused. The back-scatter-type body scanners utilize x-ray back scatter, and I think we can all agree that x-rays are ionizing radiation with known biological effects. Sure, they levels may be very low, but repeated low-level exposure to ionizing radiation can be dangerous, and it's not so simple as just dismissing it as non-ionizing radiation.
The other type of scanner are terahertz millimeter-wave scanners. While not technically ionizing, terahertz radiation is much more energetic than UHF microwaves, and the jury is still out on their exact biological effects.
Note that I said AT LEAST once a year. Obviously there is a wide range of service intervals, as there is a wide range of types of race engines. On one end, midget cars may go multiple seasons without requiring a rebuild. At the other extreme, top fuel dragster engines are rebuilt literally every single time they are run. They could end up being rebuilt several times in a single day.
This is the case for ANY motor not specifically designed to run on high-ethanol-content fuels. Ethanol is a strong solvent and strips oil films, breaks down hoses and seals, oxidizes ferrous metals, and generally tears apart gasoline motors. E85 "flex-fuel" motors are designed with ethanol's nastiness in mind, using different materials and lubricants, but even then, running E85 is harder on the engine and usually calls for more frequent service intervals.
Running E85 in ANY engine that does not explicitly state that it is designed to run on E85 will cause permanent and rapid damage. It'll probably completely destroy the engine before your next oil change.
Ethanol is complete crap as an engine fuel, with the lone exception being purpose built race engines that can utilize the higher detonation resistance for more horsepower per unit displacement. And those race motors tend to get rebuilt at least once a year, mitigating the wear factors.
I'm not complaining. Anyone insane enough to visit Iran who is NOT a spy merits execution for being stupid. If the "relatives" want to emigrate he doesn't need to visit them, and if they don't they aren't worth visiting.
I know, right? I mean it's not like thousands of Iranian-American immigrants and their US-Born children enter Iran every year to visit their extended family members. That's almost as absurd as those people returning safely to American soil and making the trip multiple times! I mean, if my 80 year old grandmother doesn't want to emigrate to the US, well then, fuck her terrorist ass, right? Next thing you know, people will be claiming that Iranian law allows the US-born children of Iranian citizens to freely enter the country! LOL!
In other words, youth and skill are no match for old age and treachery.
Dad? Is that you?
It's the complete reverse in the rest of America, too. Everyone else is pushing for online payment and electronic billing because it saves on paper and postage costs.
Verizon is the first company I've seen try to pull an asshat move like this. I think why Verizon is trying it now involves a couple things. For one, large telecoms like Verizon and AT&T have for years felt entitled to licenses to print money hand over fist, and whenever revenue drops due to market changes or technological development, their biggest priority is to find somewhere else to recoup that lost revenue. My guess here is that Verizon noticed that a majority of their customers were already paying their bills online, so they decided to start charging a fee to do it, knowing that their customer base already appreciates the convenience of online bill payment and inertia would prevent them from paying by mail. Other service providers, public utilities for example, likely have much older, entrenched, and less 'tech-savvy' customers so they need to provide incentives to move towards online billing and its associated cost savings.
Doesn't make much business sense, but at least the community can actually benefit from HP's blunders this time.
Want me to dissect your whine?
I wasn't looking for pity, I was just trying to provide a dose of perspective. Supporting or taking part of the OWS protests does not automatically make you a whining leftist, nor even significantly increase the probability that you ARE a whining leftist. There are plenty of productive, hard-working people that are pissed off too.
1) Considering you say you "spent 2 years serving my country, 6 of them getting shot in Kandahar" I'm going to guess your math skills might be why had trouble finding a job.
Sorry, that was a typo. It should read "6 months of them"
2) You relocated to DC Metro...for why? Lowest unemployment not quite - US average 9.1%, Washington DC is 10.9%. Assuming you meant Arlington, etc sure, the unemployment rates are low, but there are a lot of reasons for that that have nothing to do with availability of jobs - could be that it's so damn expensive, the unemployed are forced out quickly. Personally, considering how easy the internet has made wide-ranging search and communication, the idea of moving to a place and THEN expecting to find a job there is fairly retarded.
I relocated when I received a job offer, which happened to be only a few hours away. My job search was nationwide, and relocation was pretty much inevitable as I attended a rural and remote campus.
And I used the term "DC Metro area" which would imply, yes, I did mean "Arlington, etc." The DC-MD-VA Metropolitan Statistical Area has an unemployment rate of 6.1, well below the national average.
Those are pretty damn good salaries. I don't give a flying shit what your peers were offered 5 years and a different economy ago, and honestly, it shouldn't matter to you unless your main goal is self-pity.
My whole point was the fact that the economy is totally different, I'm not interested in pity. I'm thankful to have a job that affords me a comfortable standard of living. But that doesn't diminish the fact that over the last 5 years, wages have shrunk while inflation has barely slowed. Look back further, and real wages have been dropping for decades.
4) I don't disagree with you about the bullshit bailouts. So why are you protesting Wall Street? We have elected representatives and big fat books of laws that were supposed to be regulating this. You're protesting wolves being wolves, when the guys we elected to watch the wolves are either entirely asleep (or worse, mating with them). Point your anger at the problem.
It's not about "protesting Wall Street." Protesting on Wall Street is a symbolic gesture, but the anger is directed at politicians more concerned about campaign donations and lobbyist bribes from the financial sector than the interest of the American middle class. The wolves were able to eat the sheep because the shepherd was more interested in the stripper that the wolves hired than watching his flock.
But on the other hand the unemployment rate for those with college degrees is about 4.5% which beats the national average ~10%.
For the entire population. But even for those with college degrees, the unemployment rate for those 18-35 (i.e. recent graduates) is in excess of 20%
Watching OWS protests, where we have largely a population of educated middle-class or higher kids (who are staggeringly wealthy by any world standard), who have spent their lives:
- getting everything they need, and pretty much everything they want
- have never known hunger
- have always been basically healthy
- have never seen war except as volunteers, which is pretty damn unlikely anyway (more importantly, have never faced the ravage of war across their homes)
I recently graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, easily one of the most "Useful and Marketable" undergraduate degrees you can have. I am also a veteran who spent 2 years serving his country, 6 of them getting shot at in Kandahar. I have relocated to the DC-Metro area, one of the areas of lowest unemployment in the country. I BARELY found a job, and at a significantly lower salary than what my peers were being offered in 2007. My tuition costs more than doubled while I was in school. All the while, we've been dumping trillions of dollars to cover the asses of bankers and insurers underwriting ridiculous risks in order to make a quick buck.
But sure, OWS is a bunch of whining leftist hippies. Seriously dude, get fucked.
I really resent this pervasive attitude that anyone who complains about being saddled with student loans is some kind of jobless hippie with a philosophy degree and a total lack of judgement.
I studied Electrical Engineering at an in-state public university. For 3.5 years of my student career I was on a "full" ROTC scholarship. I worked full-time every summer, and spent the last several semesters of school working 25 hours a week. When I wasn't able to complete the ROTC program and commission as an officer, I was called up for 2 years in my enlisted grade, 6 months of which I spent getting shot at in Kandahar, and upon my return to school to finish my degree, I had 80% eligibility for the GI Bill. I shouldn't have any student loans, right? Except I managed to rack up about $45k in student debt after all the interest capitalization.
How, you ask? Well for one, the "full" ROTC scholarship only covers tuition and fees, but not room and board. Which was actually more than half of the cost of college for the 3 years or so. I was required to be part of a full-time, on campus senior military college, and thus on-campus room and board was not an optional cost. I got jack-diddly squat from my parents, since my father had managed to bury himself under ill-advised consumer debt. I also got nothing in Federal aid beyond minimal, unsubsidized stafford loans since my father, despite being debt-poor, had a high income on paper. Tuition and fees alone, during my time as a student increased from about $2200/semester as a freshman in 2003 to about $4000/semester in Spring 2011. And let's not forget the costs of books, software, computers, equipment for labs, etc.
Thankfully, I was able to relatively quickly find a decent paying job, which in this economic climate is difficult even with a BS in Electrical Engineering. However, my finances still feel the drag of tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. This is money I could be spending, that my home state could be collecting sales tax on.
But I guess it's a waste of tax payer dollars to make higher education affordable. After all, anyone with $50k in student loan debt is obviously a lazy, liberal hippie wasting their time pursuing a worthless degree and will never contribute anything to economic growth.
Huh? Is malaria infection a big problem with European cattle? Is there some other disease ravaging European cattle herds that could easily be prevented with a vaccine that isn't used?
I don't quite understand what point you are trying to get across. Could you clarify?
I am mostly cutting and pasting from a reply to a post I made earlier in this thread, but signal strength is only one of many factors they care to measure. In addition the numerous variables that affect any NLOS radio system, LTE adds MIMO techniques, which means you also have to care about the spatial correlation in your multi-antenna set up and how it varies with other conditions and your location. Also, MIMO relies on some rather sophisticated digital signal processing, and the implementation of this processing is left up to the individual device manufacturer and thus its performance will vary among not just RF conditions, but among different devices. Throw in the fact that LTE has no in-built capability for voice calls, and now you have a slew of devices that have to fall back to the CDMA2000 network to make or receive a phone call.
Looking at the setup as described in the article, I really doubt it's terribly interested in signal strength at all. All you need for that is a single radio on a single antenna, paired with a GPS receiver. But in these setups, they're collecting data through several different consumer handsets and devices, so I think they are more interested in evaluating their performance and behavior under less-than-ideal RF conditions. They're interested in how the devices perform handovers, fall backs, how their MIMO implementations handle various real-world conditions, and generally how nicely they devices play with their network.
First of all, signal strength is only one of many factors they care to measure. In addition the numerous variables that affect any NLOS radio system, LTE adds MIMO techniques, which means you also have to care about the spatial correlation in your multi-antenna set up and how it varies with other conditions and your location. Also, MIMO relies on some rather sophisticated digital signal processing, and the implementation of this processing is left up to the individual device manufacturer and thus its performance will vary among not just RF conditions, but among different devices. Throw in the fact that LTE has no in-built capability for voice calls, and now you have a slew of devices that have to fall back to the CDMA2000 network to make or receive a phone call.
Looking at the setup as described in the article, I really doubt it's terribly interested in signal strength at all. They're collecting data through several different consumer handsets and devices, so I think they are more interested in evaluating their performance and behavior under less-than-ideal RF conditions. They're interested in how the devices perform handovers, fall backs, how their MIMO implementations handle various real-world conditions, and generally how nicely they devices play with their network.
Frankly, I see several of the candidates promising to reduce government spending and I only see a few that are wearing religion on their sleeves. Romney is not one of them - in fact, any time he is asked about his religion he side steps the question. That topic has been hashed over plenty by Huckabee in 2008.
You only see a few that wear religion on their sleeves? Romney and Ron Paul may not do it, but pretty much every other candidate does. Perry, Gingrich, Bachmann, Palin, and Cain are all theocratic lunatics. Hell, Romney's biggest challenger to date, Perry, stared his campaign with a fucking prayer rally.
Because letting the states determine person-hood worked out so well in the past.
Sign him up for sports. Make him play for 2 years. Make him learn to be a teammate. Make him learn to be a human.
Nah, if he sucks at it, sports could turn him away from athletic activity for a lifetime.
Much better to just get the kid a dirtbike. Nothing like a few wheelies to prevent intellectual burnout.
CDMA is a multiplexing/multiple access technique. GSM is a standard (and a rather old one at that). UMTS/HSPA, though they use SIM cards and were developed by the same standards body as, and somewhat backwards compatible with, GSM, they are not GSM. GSM is a 2G standard like cdmaOne. UMTS is a 3G standard like CDMA2000 (the actual standard that Sprint and Verizon use).
Good thing someone actually recognized the technical merit of CDMA though, because UMTS/HSPA ditched the TDMA scheme used in GSM for a CDMA-based scheme.
They may stop pushing WiMax, but the article makes no mention of repurposing the 2500Mhz band that spring/clearwire use for WiMax. The only thing I've seen about anything being turned off is their legacy iDEN equipment, the spectrum for which they will use for LTE rollouts. I haven't seen any indication that Sprint plans to turn off their 2500Mhz WiMax, or deploy LTE on that spectrum.
This article is about Sprint rolling out an LTE network, and in case you didn't know, LTE is basically state-of-the-art in mobile access technologies. Of standards on the horizon, only LTE-Advanced is superior, but the standards for it aren't even finalized. There won't be any LTE-Advanced products for a few years.
The US carriers have been lagging europe and asia for a while, but they can catch up very quickly with LTE rollouts since there really isn't anything better than LTE right now. And once LTE-Advanced is finished, it's basically just a software upgrade to existing LTE infrastructure.
Sprint/Nextel's iDEN network is scheduled to be phased out in 2013.
We've had 4G here now for over a year. (Real 4G, not the 3G+ that I heard some providers in the US has been marketing as "4G")
No you haven't. "Real" 4G as defined by the ITU doesn't actually exist yet. You may have LTE networks, but they're Rel 8 or Rel 9 stuff. As far as LTE goes, only LTE-Advanced is "real" 4G, and the standards for LTE-Advanced haven't even been finalized yet, let alone any commercial products available that support it.
One could speculate that the reason why they got out of the (volatile) consumer market is that they are betting their money on memristors. Why make and market a few devices when you have a monopoly on parts that will go into everyone else's?
But if this were the case, why would they fail to make a visible statement about their memristor business either before or at the same time that they announce their abandonment of the consumer electronics market? It's one thing to say "Hey, we're radically changing our business model, but it's because we've got this great new product that is basically a license to print money," and completely another thing to say, "Oh hey, we're giving up on everything we've been doing for the past decade because it's low margin" with no explanation why.
Slight clarification/correction: WCDMA itself is NOT a general term for wideband CDMA techniques, it is a specific implementation of code-division unique to the 3G UMTS standards.