The U.S. is the 7th most energy spending country in the world.
Few of these nations use any coal (they rank high since oil is more or less free, or it's very cold there). US and China are using half the worlds total production of coal.
In Canada and Iceland only 28% and 0.1% of the energy comes from fossil fuel, verses 78% in the US.
When I was a kid I used to go skiing in the winter, now I go bike riding. What will change the next 10 years? Something IS happening, and I blame the polution until someone gives me something else to blame.
We have had the same system in Norway for some years now, and it works very well.
It's organized by a non-profit company, and all companies that sell electronics are forced to add a small tax to all products they sell and must collect e-garbage. You can hand in all kinds of electronic at any store that sells electronic articles. So since most 7-elevens sell cell-phones, you could - if you wanted - hand in your 21" CRT-monitor here. Normally you whould hand in the old stuff at the place you buy the new.
The risk of it ending up as forrign aid in africa is very small, since the recycling centers are financed by the government, and it's a lot cheaper to send it there, then shipping it outside the country. (We are currenty paying 7$/gallon for petrol, so we tend to send things as short as possible....=)
I can hardly belive there will be any literate person not using internet on at least a weekly basis 15 years from now.
Some numbers from Norway / Scandinavia: 74% (2004) of the people older then 15 use internet-banking. 10% of the population recieve their bills online, and don't even see a dead-tree-invoice. (100% increase from 2004) Allmost all major common applications/forms are aviable online. (VAT for companies, Personal Tax, etc), and are extremly popular. (I did not find any numbers now, but I think about 30-50% handed in there tax papers online). The numbers of dead-tree-news-papers are declining every year. The number of online newspapers are growing wildly.
The fee for paying a physical invoice in a bank is 10$ (-ten us dollars-).
Driving on a skidpad is compulsory in some Europeen countries. This is a actually a very fun excercise where you must try to avoid objects with ABS-breaks and without them. One of the excercises is named the "Elg-manøver" or Elk-maneuver, where you try to avoid hitting a sudden object crossing the road.
How to get your drivers lisence in Norway: (Part 0. Pass the health requirements, good vision, etc) Part 1. Attend 17 hours of trafic 101 (TGK) classes at a driving school (includes first aid training in a set up accident and 3 hours of night driving). Part 2. Car Handeling: 1 hour compulsory driving with a driving school and then as much privat training as you whould like (with a person older then 25, with more then 5 years experience. It is common with 50 hours or more before continuing training). Part 3. Trafic Handling: 4 hours of training on a closed track with instructor, including driving on a skidpad (2 hours). Part 4: Final Training: 13 hours compulsory training (8 hours on road) with a driving school. Part 5: 1.5 hour theory test Part 6: 1 hour practical driving test.
Note that to be a licenced driving instructor you need 3 years of university level education.
The total price for getting a licence is around 3.000$, more if you need addional training or does not pass the practical test the first time.
This may seem very expensive, but last year there was less then 200 people killed while driving in Norway (around half due to drugs/alcohol), with aprox. 4 mill registered vehicles in the country.
And specially considuring that on most roads they only remove the snow, and not the ice during winter, in a period where there are 5-6 hours or less of daylight during the winter season (the northern part does not see the sun for 2-3 months). You are required to use snow-tiers (with steel-spikes or soft-rubber) for 4-5 months a year even in the southern part.
Most people are pleased with the requirements for getting the licence. No political parties wants to change the driving education significantly, one party wants the training to be a part of the compulsory education at school.
(By the way: Almost all cars have a stick-gear change, since you need the clutch to regain control of car the if/when you skid while driving on ice. The average age of a car in Norway is around 10 years old, petrol cost aprox 1.6$/l (6-7$/gallon), drive 20 miles/hour too fast and you risk a 1000$ ticket, a new Toyota Yaris cost around 30.000$ after paying fees to the state. What the fees of cars, petrol and tickets should be, on the other hand, is heavily debated =)
Sweden, Finland and Norway are also covered in show, but I whould not claim that any of these countries ha ve problems competing.
I whould say that the number of cell-phones/patents/your-favorite-tech-index-item is more important then how many tons of corn you can produce every year.
A tough climate forces people to be inovative. If you can't kick a palm tree to get your daily dinner, but have to don your thermo elk survival suit and drill 15 holes in the ice to put out your fishing net - you will have an initiative to improve/invent tools.
By the way - the picture must be taken mid winter, e.g January, given the amount of snow on the pictures.
Some smaller airports does not have any problems with the security and baggage. On my local International Airport I have never used more then 15 minutes from leaving the plane, to standing on the platform for the airport express train. Same with checking in. I have never used more then 5 minutes in line to get to the plane.
Why is this not possible on a larger airport?
Is it a airport design flaw? Is it because you have to screen your hand luggage multiple times? Or show your passport 4 times? What are they actually looking for in the 2 seconds they are checking? Oki, my name was not "Saddam" or "Osama" when the first security guard checked it. Do they think I changed my passport while waiting in line for the next check? Does it take exponentially more time to handle more people? Please tell me what the problem is!
- simpel and effective way to reserve against commercial junk mail. All marketers are required by law to wash their databases (This actually works very good! I have not seen an ad with my address on it for many years.) - no fuss at elections (no registration required), easy to vote in advance when you are out of town etc. - all correspondence from any public office will go to the correct adress. (Also from the traffic/police department...) - some banks use the adress from the database when they issue cards - this makes it hard to optain a card in another persons name. - makes it quick and cheap to process applications (E.g. an application for a student loan from the State Educational Loan Fund would take only a few days.) - makes it very hard/impossible to be polygamous... - access and use of the data is controlled stritcly by an independent agency.
Do not missunderstand me; I am no fan of government control, and probably more or less as paranoid about loosing my citizen rights as the average slashdot-reader, but I have no bad experiences with "Folkeregisteret", and I have troube imagining how you can run a country without one...
Telenor has a system called "Mobilhandel" (Mobile Trade) here in Norway (Scandinavia). If you want to buy a snack, you can send an SMS with some codewords that you find on the machine, and your Mars bar will pop out. This system has been around some time and you can pay car-parking, cinema tickets or even airplane tickets with it. I have never used it since I use another cell-phone operator. The system is not very popular by many reasons (limited number of user-places, hassel to set up - you need a new SIM-card, and limited to one operator).
There is another way of using your phone to pay. Some banks offer access to your bank account via SMS and WAP. I have uses it some times, and it works great, you only have to remember to bring your note with one-time-codes to use it. I prefere to use a computer to pay bills and stuff, but if I am sitting on the train on my way home from work and my brother needs to borrow some money, it's an ok alternative.
In Scandinavia you can use your debit card almost everywere, and that is the most common way to pay; almost all shops, buses, parking-meters, petrol-pumps etc. Transaction speed is very quick (normally 1-2 seconds), and most banks does not charge pr transaction, only a small annual charge. I have not used cash on a weekly basis for years.
People with cell phones: 96% (July 2004 - source) Houses with landlines: 2001: 91.6% 2004: 84.8%
In 2004 15% of all SMS trafic was premium SMS (ringtones, televotes, chat services etc)
A total of 1.7 billion SMS-messages was sent in 2004. The average subscriber sent 68 SMS/month. (Aprox 5 million people/subscribers in norway) This is 16% more then in 2003.
Nov 4. 2004: 59% of all norwegian corporate leaders belives they will abandon landlines. source
All providers have more or less the same coverage, which is very good. If you can drive there - you are more or less garanteed coverage. Lost calls, or breakdown seldom/never occur.
I guess this is more or less the same for all of North-Europe.
Most emergency unit drivers don't use the GPS-information much to get to the scene, they usually know the city pretty good. The electronic map/GPS-system are usually only used by new drivers, or in major happenings where units are relocated from its usual area.
The problem is not so much getting rescue personnel to the scene, as for the coordinator not beeing able to see where the units are. At least here in Europe almost all emergency vehicles has a GPS and a GSM-GPRS/TETRA-uplink to the dispatch for effective use of the resources.
>The right to use mines in the Korean DMZ, which is a very special case. The mines pose no dangers of the types the treaty is trying to prevent, > as all are in a closed, guarded area and mapped. So you could not sign because you could not find any other technology to protect a small area? Sounds like you are stuck in one track. On the top of my mind I can think of: - Claymore mines (directional fragmentation mines, legal to use according to the treaty) - A huke dike (not the type Bush does not like...) - A huge wall. Gaza-strip/Berlin fashion. - Some hitech IR-sensor connected to a minigun (You could probably make this slashdot-style yourself with parts from Homedepot and your local Guns'r Us arms dealer)
>Better verification and compliance provisions. "We could not make sure everybody that drove a car had a licence, so we thought it was better to not have one at all" "We could not check any everybody at the airport check-in 100% so..." etc...
>The right to make self-destructing anti-tank and anti-personnel mines (again, not part of the long-term danger the treaty is about). Whould you buy a house with a garden if the real-estate agent told you: "There are 100 anti-personell mines in the garden, but don't you worry at all because they are not active any more due to the self-destructing routine..." http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9609/06/laos.legacy/ I am not a bomb expert, but I thought all bombs where ment to self-destruct in some way after they where armed and dropped?
2904 full size 4WD pickup trucks 8800-1760 houses (depending on where you live, of course) 176000 TV's 17600 snowmobiles 4400000 music CD's 3520 university educations (in the US. In some countries uni.educations is free, then the money would be used for beer.) 44 Lear Jet airplane 88088 Rubber ducks (Now on sale) 1 Bush-for-president campaign...
>I'm curious as to how "liberal" slashdot is. I guess there are a lot of international slashdot users, and most non-americans whould vote for a liberal candidate.
This link (click the link below to show link) sendes the first 10.000 numbers of pi as a parameter to a existing script on the evil site. Whould fill the error-log in no-time =)
Same thing in Norway - you could probably find the cell-phone number to 80% of the population in the online-phonebook. We only pay for outgoing calls unless you are abroad.
Telemarketing or text-message-SPAM has never been a problem, since this is not legal.
You have ads for other products on the DVDs you buy in the US? I do not think there are that on the EU versions of the DVD's. At least I have never seen it. If you have multi-zone players (most dvd-players sold here are), then maybe you could just import the EU-version? Just a thought...
I do not agree at all! Technically it is possible, and it has been for many years now (except from the battery issue). But have you tried to watch a film in the size of your creditcard? It sucks. Then it is the human-machine issue - how can you watch it comfortably? I you put it on a desk, your neck will hurt in ten minutes. Your arm will hurt if you try to hold it comfortably for you eyes. And when are you seriously planning to use it? When did you last look at your credit card and think: "If only this had been a ultra-small T.V...". When watching a screen it requires a lot of visual attention. This makes it very hard to combine it with other activites like driving, biking, snowboarding or walking.
Re:This would be in America. right?
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 1
I do not know about CDMA/TDMA, but this is not correct for the GSM-system. GSM does not support priority calls. The only system I know off that supports priority is TETRA.
Re:Jammers and Dampers
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I do really not see the point with jamming or materials for damping the signal - this is a social problem!
In Norway, as in most of Europe, cell-phones is very common. You would need to look hard to find anyone beyond the age 13 that does not have one. In the beginning there was some problems with people talking everywere, kids sending SMS to each other in class and stuff, but this has been solved by other means then jamming!
Nobody would ever recive, and take the call in a theater. Kids are not allowed to use cells at school. Trains have "Quiet-wagons", where you are not allowed to use your cell-phone. On the Subway, there are no quiet-wagons, but people would seldom take long conversations here - cells are usaually used for quick calls or SMS/WAP.
That is realy cool! I have a HP-PDA running WinCE and a IE-browser, and it just screws up the webpages. Completely useless!
This is why I would consider investing in Opera; There is a huge market for displaying information on mobil devices, and it is growing very fast.
You can make jokes all day about how hard it is, and all the limitations there are with WAP-browsers, and I partly agree with you, but there is no denying that it has lots of users.
With a WAP browser on your cellphone you can access information like weather, up to the minute news, bus and train timetables, jokes and a lot more while on the move. Norway has a popultion of about 5 mill people. In July 2003 87,7% of all norwegians had a cellphone! Just one of the news sites (wap.nrk.no) had 1 mill pageviews/month in Oct 2003.
Some banks have WAP-services where you can check your balance and transfere money.
I use WAP services probably 5-15 min. every day on my black/white tiny cellphone display - mostly for reading news on the subway. For that I pay around 5-6 euro/month to the network provider for data transfer over GPRS.
There is a need for something better then todays WAP-browsers. For mobile devices you need a small, quick, user friendly, keypad only browser. This does not sound like MSIE to me.
This is a quick translation of some of the technical bits in on of the articles - please excuse the bad english.
"The database is made around 1990 [...] The files are in dBase format version IV [...] There should be around 11.000 postings. It is hard to say anything about the quality of the database. We have the data files, but we do not have the right software to access the files. [...] We have 18 leafbooks(?) [ - 'Ringpermer' in norwegian] with printouts of all the postings in the database sorted after ID-numbers and not book-title. The database is stored on three floppy disks." Some local IT-departments have tried to open the database files, but have failed, party beacuse the database have been password protected.
Is it legal to chip players in the US? It's legal here in Norway. It's even legal to sell chipped players in the stores. How is it in the rest of the world?
Slashdot Mirror
The U.S. is the 7th most energy spending country in the world.
Few of these nations use any coal (they rank high since oil is more or less free, or it's very cold there). US and China are using half the worlds total production of coal.
In Canada and Iceland only 28% and 0.1% of the energy comes from fossil fuel, verses 78% in the US.
When I was a kid I used to go skiing in the winter, now I go bike riding. What will change the next 10 years?
Something IS happening, and I blame the polution until someone gives me something else to blame.
We have had the same system in Norway for some years now, and it works very well.
It's organized by a non-profit company, and all companies that sell electronics are forced to add a small tax to all products they sell and must collect e-garbage. You can hand in all kinds of electronic at any store that sells electronic articles. So since most 7-elevens sell cell-phones, you could - if you wanted - hand in your 21" CRT-monitor here. Normally you whould hand in the old stuff at the place you buy the new.
The risk of it ending up as forrign aid in africa is very small, since the recycling centers are financed by the government, and it's a lot cheaper to send it there, then shipping it outside the country. (We are currenty paying 7$/gallon for petrol, so we tend to send things as short as possible....=)
I can hardly belive there will be any literate person not using internet on at least a weekly basis 15 years from now.
Some numbers from Norway / Scandinavia:
74% (2004) of the people older then 15 use internet-banking.
10% of the population recieve their bills online, and don't even see a dead-tree-invoice. (100% increase from 2004)
Allmost all major common applications/forms are aviable online. (VAT for companies, Personal Tax, etc), and are extremly popular. (I did not find any numbers now, but I think about 30-50% handed in there tax papers online).
The numbers of dead-tree-news-papers are declining every year.
The number of online newspapers are growing wildly.
The fee for paying a physical invoice in a bank is 10$ (-ten us dollars-).
Driving on a skidpad is compulsory in some Europeen countries. This is a actually a very fun excercise where you must try to avoid objects with ABS-breaks and without them. One of the excercises is named the "Elg-manøver" or Elk-maneuver, where you try to avoid hitting a sudden object crossing the road.
How to get your drivers lisence in Norway:
(Part 0. Pass the health requirements, good vision, etc)
Part 1. Attend 17 hours of trafic 101 (TGK) classes at a driving school (includes first aid training in a set up accident and 3 hours of night driving).
Part 2. Car Handeling: 1 hour compulsory driving with a driving school and then as much privat training as you whould like (with a person older then 25, with more then 5 years experience. It is common with 50 hours or more before continuing training).
Part 3. Trafic Handling: 4 hours of training on a closed track with instructor, including driving on a skidpad (2 hours).
Part 4: Final Training: 13 hours compulsory training (8 hours on road) with a driving school.
Part 5: 1.5 hour theory test
Part 6: 1 hour practical driving test.
Note that to be a licenced driving instructor you need 3 years of university level education.
The total price for getting a licence is around 3.000$, more if you need addional training or does not pass the practical test the first time.
This may seem very expensive, but last year there was less then 200 people killed while driving in Norway (around half due to drugs/alcohol), with aprox. 4 mill registered vehicles in the country.
And specially considuring that on most roads they only remove the snow, and not the ice during winter, in a period where there are 5-6 hours or less of daylight during the winter season (the northern part does not see the sun for 2-3 months). You are required to use snow-tiers (with steel-spikes or soft-rubber) for 4-5 months a year even in the southern part.
Most people are pleased with the requirements for getting the licence. No political parties wants to change the driving education significantly, one party wants the training to be a part of the compulsory education at school.
(By the way: Almost all cars have a stick-gear change, since you need the clutch to regain control of car the if/when you skid while driving on ice. The average age of a car in Norway is around 10 years old, petrol cost aprox 1.6$/l (6-7$/gallon), drive 20 miles/hour too fast and you risk a 1000$ ticket, a new Toyota Yaris cost around 30.000$ after paying fees to the state. What the fees of cars, petrol and tickets should be, on the other hand, is heavily debated =)
Sweden, Finland and Norway are also covered in show, but I whould not claim that any of these countries ha ve problems competing.
I whould say that the number of cell-phones/patents/your-favorite-tech-index-item is more important then how many tons of corn you can produce every year.
A tough climate forces people to be inovative. If you can't kick a palm tree to get your daily dinner, but have to don your thermo elk survival suit and drill 15 holes in the ice to put out your fishing net - you will have an initiative to improve/invent tools.
By the way - the picture must be taken mid winter, e.g January, given the amount of snow on the pictures.
Some smaller airports does not have any problems with the security and baggage. On my local International Airport I have never used more then 15 minutes from leaving the plane, to standing on the platform for the airport express train. Same with checking in. I have never used more then 5 minutes in line to get to the plane.
Why is this not possible on a larger airport?
Is it a airport design flaw? Is it because you have to screen your hand luggage multiple times? Or show your passport 4 times? What are they actually looking for in the 2 seconds they are checking? Oki, my name was not "Saddam" or "Osama" when the first security guard checked it. Do they think I changed my passport while waiting in line for the next check? Does it take exponentially more time to handle more people? Please tell me what the problem is!
Some advantages with this register in Norway:
- simpel and effective way to reserve against commercial junk mail. All marketers are required by law to wash their databases (This actually works very good! I have not seen an ad with my address on it for many years.)
- no fuss at elections (no registration required), easy to vote in advance when you are out of town etc.
- all correspondence from any public office will go to the correct adress. (Also from the traffic/police department...)
- some banks use the adress from the database when they issue cards - this makes it hard to optain a card in another persons name.
- makes it quick and cheap to process applications (E.g. an application for a student loan from the State Educational Loan Fund would take only a few days.)
- makes it very hard/impossible to be polygamous...
- access and use of the data is controlled stritcly by an independent agency.
Do not missunderstand me; I am no fan of government control, and probably more or less as paranoid about loosing my citizen rights as the average slashdot-reader, but I have no bad experiences with "Folkeregisteret", and I have troube imagining how you can run a country without one...
Telenor has a system called "Mobilhandel" (Mobile Trade) here in Norway (Scandinavia). If you want to buy a snack, you can send an SMS with some codewords that you find on the machine, and your Mars bar will pop out. This system has been around some time and you can pay car-parking, cinema tickets or even airplane tickets with it. I have never used it since I use another cell-phone operator. The system is not very popular by many reasons (limited number of user-places, hassel to set up - you need a new SIM-card, and limited to one operator).
There is another way of using your phone to pay. Some banks offer access to your bank account via SMS and WAP. I have uses it some times, and it works great, you only have to remember to bring your note with one-time-codes to use it. I prefere to use a computer to pay bills and stuff, but if I am sitting on the train on my way home from work and my brother needs to borrow some money, it's an ok alternative.
In Scandinavia you can use your debit card almost everywere, and that is the most common way to pay; almost all shops, buses, parking-meters, petrol-pumps etc. Transaction speed is very quick (normally 1-2 seconds), and most banks does not charge pr transaction, only a small annual charge. I have not used cash on a weekly basis for years.
Some numbers from Norway:
People with cell phones: 96% (July 2004 - source)
Houses with landlines:
2001: 91.6%
2004: 84.8%
In 2004 15% of all SMS trafic was premium SMS (ringtones, televotes, chat services etc)
A total of 1.7 billion SMS-messages was sent in 2004. The average subscriber sent 68 SMS/month. (Aprox 5 million people/subscribers in norway) This is 16% more then in 2003.
Nov 4. 2004: 59% of all norwegian corporate leaders belives they will abandon landlines.
source
The cheapest call planes are:
Monthly cost: 0
Price pr/min: 0,13$ (0,79 NOK)
Price pr/SMS: 0,06$ (0,40 NOK)
All providers have more or less the same coverage, which is very good. If you can drive there - you are more or less garanteed coverage. Lost calls, or breakdown seldom/never occur.
I guess this is more or less the same for all of North-Europe.
Most emergency unit drivers don't use the GPS-information much to get to the scene, they usually know the city pretty good. The electronic map/GPS-system are usually only used by new drivers, or in major happenings where units are relocated from its usual area.
The problem is not so much getting rescue personnel to the scene, as for the coordinator not beeing able to see where the units are. At least here in Europe almost all emergency vehicles has a GPS and a GSM-GPRS/TETRA-uplink to the dispatch for effective use of the resources.
>The right to use mines in the Korean DMZ, which is a very special case. The mines pose no dangers of the types the treaty is trying to prevent,
> as all are in a closed, guarded area and mapped.
So you could not sign because you could not find any other technology to protect a small area? Sounds like you are stuck in one track.
On the top of my mind I can think of:
- Claymore mines (directional fragmentation mines, legal to use according to the treaty)
- A huke dike (not the type Bush does not like...)
- A huge wall. Gaza-strip/Berlin fashion.
- Some hitech IR-sensor connected to a minigun (You could probably make this slashdot-style yourself with parts from Homedepot and your local Guns'r Us arms dealer)
>Better verification and compliance provisions.
"We could not make sure everybody that drove a car had a licence, so we thought it was better to not have one at all"
"We could not check any everybody at the airport check-in 100% so..."
etc...
>The right to make self-destructing anti-tank and anti-personnel mines (again, not part of the long-term danger the treaty is about).
Whould you buy a house with a garden if the real-estate agent told you: "There are 100 anti-personell mines in the garden, but don't you worry at all because they are not active any more due to the self-destructing routine..."
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9609/06/laos.legacy/ I am not a bomb expert, but I thought all bombs where ment to self-destruct in some way after they where armed and dropped?
You could get one of the following for 88 mill:
2904 full size 4WD pickup trucks
8800-1760 houses (depending on where you live, of course)
176000 TV's
17600 snowmobiles
4400000 music CD's
3520 university educations (in the US. In some countries uni.educations is free, then the money would be used for beer.)
44 Lear Jet airplane
88088 Rubber ducks (Now on sale)
1 Bush-for-president campaign...
Nahhh...I think I still whould go for the Moon...
>I'm curious as to how "liberal" slashdot is.
I guess there are a lot of international slashdot users, and most non-americans whould vote for a liberal candidate.
Global poll shows a Kerry landslide
Like this nice link?
(click link below to show link...)
This link (click the link below to show link) sendes the first 10.000 numbers of pi as a parameter to a existing script on the evil site. Whould fill the error-log in no-time =)
Maybe we could fill the log-file?
Same thing in Norway - you could probably find the cell-phone number to 80% of the population in the online-phonebook. We only pay for outgoing calls unless you are abroad.
Telemarketing or text-message-SPAM has never been a problem, since this is not legal.
The office toilet is always out of paper - now Sony has finaly provided a "backup"...
Do you think it will come in extra soft? 3 layers?
You have ads for other products on the DVDs you buy in the US? I do not think there are that on the EU versions of the DVD's. At least I have never seen it. If you have multi-zone players (most dvd-players sold here are), then maybe you could just import the EU-version? Just a thought...
I do not agree at all! Technically it is possible, and it has been for many years now (except from the battery issue). But have you tried to watch a film in the size of your creditcard? It sucks. Then it is the human-machine issue - how can you watch it comfortably? I you put it on a desk, your neck will hurt in ten minutes. Your arm will hurt if you try to hold it comfortably for you eyes. And when are you seriously planning to use it?
When did you last look at your credit card and think: "If only this had been a ultra-small T.V...".
When watching a screen it requires a lot of visual attention. This makes it very hard to combine it with other activites like driving, biking, snowboarding or walking.
I do not know about CDMA/TDMA, but this is not correct for the GSM-system. GSM does not support priority calls. The only system I know off that supports priority is TETRA.
I do really not see the point with jamming or materials for damping the signal - this is a social problem!
In Norway, as in most of Europe, cell-phones is very common. You would need to look hard to find anyone beyond the age 13 that does not have one. In the beginning there was some problems with people talking everywere, kids sending SMS to each other in class and stuff, but this has been solved by other means then jamming!
Nobody would ever recive, and take the call in a theater. Kids are not allowed to use cells at school. Trains have "Quiet-wagons", where you are not allowed to use your cell-phone. On the Subway, there are no quiet-wagons, but people would seldom take long conversations here - cells are usaually used for quick calls or SMS/WAP.
That is realy cool! I have a HP-PDA running WinCE and a IE-browser, and it just screws up the webpages. Completely useless!
This is why I would consider investing in Opera; There is a huge market for displaying information on mobil devices, and it is growing very fast.
You can make jokes all day about how hard it is, and all the limitations there are with WAP-browsers, and I partly agree with you, but there is no denying that it has lots of users.
With a WAP browser on your cellphone you can access information like weather, up to the minute news, bus and train timetables, jokes and a lot more while on the move. Norway has a popultion of about 5 mill people. In July 2003 87,7% of all norwegians had a cellphone! Just one of the news sites (wap.nrk.no) had 1 mill pageviews/month in Oct 2003.
Some banks have WAP-services where you can check your balance and transfere money.
I use WAP services probably 5-15 min. every day on my black/white tiny cellphone display - mostly for reading news on the subway. For that I pay around 5-6 euro/month to the network provider for data transfer over GPRS.
There is a need for something better then todays WAP-browsers. For mobile devices you need a small, quick, user friendly, keypad only browser. This does not sound like MSIE to me.
This is a quick translation of some of the technical bits in on of the articles - please excuse the bad english.
"The database is made around 1990 [...] The files are in dBase format version IV [...] There should be around 11.000 postings. It is hard to say anything about the quality of the database. We have the data files, but we do not have the right software to access the files. [...] We have 18 leafbooks(?) [ - 'Ringpermer' in norwegian] with printouts of all the postings in the database sorted after ID-numbers and not book-title. The database is stored on three floppy disks."
Some local IT-departments have tried to open the database files, but have failed, party beacuse the database have been password protected.
Is it legal to chip players in the US? It's legal here in Norway. It's even legal to sell chipped players in the stores. How is it in the rest of the world?