The mainstay of digitizing for the Amiga back in the late 80's and early 90's consisted of what amounted to a black and white security camera with a color wheel mounted infront of the lens. Not a new development here, kids. Besides that, as someone else pointed out, people have been taking RGB Composite photos for close to 100 years now.
We Should All Be Afraid Of Nanotechnology Because.
on
The Dangers of Nanotech
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Them: You should be afraid of nanotechnology getting into the wrong hands!
You: Well, ok...Why? Whats there to be afraid of? Isn't the whole idea circumvented by...
Them: Nanotechnology. Be afraid.
You: Huh? That doesn't answer my question.
Them: You should be afraid of nanotechnology.
You: Err...What?? You're just repeating yourself!! You haven't given me a reason why I...
Them: Yes. Nanotechnology--It could get into the wrong hands. Osama Bin Laden's hands!
You: How on earth is nanotechnology a threat to anyone? What, you think someones going to introduce some sort of synthetic nano-machine virus into the water supply? Come on.
Them: You need to be afraid of nanotechnology falling into the wrong hands. And the water supply
You: FINE. OK. Jeezus, lets say for the sake of the argument that some "evil organization" learns how to develop nanotechnology. Fine. What good is it going to do them? What are they going to build that would be such a terrible threat to anyone? Why not simply use standard, boring old chemistry tricks to kill people? Hasn't it ever occured to you that the idea of "death by nanotechnology" is about as sensical as "And now, Batman, I will spend millions of dollars to construct a machine that lower you very slowly into a pool of imported Burmese pirahna!!"
Them: You should be afraid of nanotechnology falling into the wrong hands.
You: Hasn't it occured to you that a single drop of benzene is enough to kill a room full of people? All Benzene is, is just a ring of 8 carbon atoms. It doesn't require a knowledge of nanotechnology to make a whole bucket of....
Them: You should be afraid of Osama Bin Laden, and nanotechnology. And benzene. And mail. And muslims. And cryptography. And steganography. And bridges. And...
Having worked at IBM SSD here in Tucson, I can tell you for a fact that Big Blue takes their security very, very seriously.
I worked out on the floor -- Your typical raised-floor temperature controlled room, except on a very large scale. Without going into specifics, getting to work was always fun when it came to security. You have to go through a human checkpoint, then one card-access doorway, then another combination human/card-access doorway with a tailgate alarm.. At each point along the way you're monitored on cameras mounted in the ceiling Occasionally, if your badge doesn't work, a voice comes over the loudspeaker where you are and asks you to hold up your photo badge so they can confirm who you are before continuing.:) Beyond that, there are very, very tight controls on leaving confidential materials out in the lab overnight. We were told that janitors and off-hours maintenance crews have been busted flipping through test plans and selling off information outside the company.
My favorite story comes from one of my old floor bosses at IBM. He used to work for a defense contractor out east in New Jersey, right off the turnpike. He claims someone got busted sitting on a highway overpass with a camera and telescopic lens attachment, photographing the blackboards inside the plant. "Thats why all the exterior windows have reflective tint nowadays. Its a safety measure."
Fun stuff.. I miss IBM like you wouldn't believe. Friggin awesome company to work for.
Am, i'm glad to see this article. I used to be a huge fan of Command & Conquer, and have always loved the genre, that is, until each version of the game became a cookie-cutter tank blitz. If we're to model a game that uses real-world terrain, why not have real-world problems?
In real warfare, rivers need to be spanned with pontoons, trees need to be cut down, supplies need to be dropped ahead of advancing troops and huge swathes of land need to be cleared in order for it to be traversable by military equiptment.
Incorporating concepts like airdrops of food, oil and gasoline would be a good start. This would prevent the sort of mindless tank parade crap that ruins the fun of the game. If you want to make a tank parade, fine, make one, but you're also going to need to build an airstrip and a C-130 to airdrop supplies of fuel, oil, and food ahead of the parade so your troops dont starve to death, burn out the engines in their tanks, or run out of gas halfway to their targets.
Now, onto the fun stuff. The Geneva Convention forbids certain activities during warfare. It should be an option given to you as to whether or not you would like to risk violating the Geneva convention. I like being able to express my personality within the design of my armies, and the better games out there (i've found) allow me to incorporate that facet pretty easilly. Some things that come to mind are:
A well-seasoned network admin friend of mine and I once had a conversation over dinner about an idea I had brewing -- An application that would attempt to guesstimate where you were on earth based on triangulating distances from known servers by means of measuring ping time. A small network database that contained, say, a hundred servers nationwide that constantly maintained a list of ping times to a hundred other machines would provide enough coverage and enough data to allow a single machine to guesstimate where it is on earth based upon simple trig.
The only problem with this idea is that A) Network latency times can change erratically from moment to moment, and B) Some nodes may even drop out of the network due to upgrades or flaming death. Depending upon how fine-grained the mesh is, and depending how accurate you want the guesstimate to be, you could be reasonably certain of at least being able to determine your location within a couple hundred miles.
Not useful for you and I, I know.. But it would be kinda cool if people could buy PCs, set up them straight out of the box, and the box goes out on the mesh and figures out where it is in the U.S., and sets the time accordingly, suggests local IPs, other stuff.
Amazing what you can discuss over a bacon cheeseburger, eh?
Even Tinyapps' apps are somewhat bloated. Pong in 52 bytes -- Thats tiny. Not to mention, I wrote a full-featured image viewer for X11 that fades in any image from black, holds it according to a user-specified number of seconds, and fades it out. Its fast, flexible, well documented, and bug free. It has support for images as small as 1x1 to 32767x32767 in any depth, supports nearly a dozen different image formats, has wildcard support, scaling support, a controllable fader speed, and a verbose mode tossed in for the hell of it. Total weight of the binary?... 19KB.
Here's a tarball with the source and a precompiled binary, if you want it. Slideshow 1.1.
Theres alot that makes sense about this. Personally, I think virus writers should face prison time. Too many people get hurt when their work is destroyed. Its not a productivity issue--You can always keep working. Its when a virus nails something irreplacable, like data which hasn't encompassed by a backup or is otherwise made irrecoverable, thats the main issue.
The only problem with the idea is that I like the idea of "white hat" viruses, or virii that actually do constructive things like plug holes, or notify sysadmins of security breaches. Thats fine, and gentle mischeif like that is perfectly in keeping with the spirit of what makes the industry so interesting in the first place.
Lets try to distinguish between good viruses and bad viruses the same way as we're now beginning to distinguish between white hat hackers and black hat hackers, hm?:)
Its true, GRUB is a superior bootloader. But good, i'm glad to see that at least a choice is provided. Old folks like us cut our teeth on LILO, and have gotten to know it fairly well over the years..if I have the option to stick with it, I will.
Red Hat is not synonymous with Linux.
on
Red Hat 7.2 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
But it may just as well be.
I've been using RH since 2.0.27 on a 386SX/12, and like many of you, have stuck with Red Hat in one form or another for many years. However, recently Red Hat's distrib has begun to suffer, largely because of oddball decisions like the ones we're seeing in 7.2.
LILO has been replaced with GRUB. Why? So we can confuse things even more for the people who we're trying to attract to the platform? If it aint broke, don't fix it, gang. You have an installed user base that knows the ins and outs of LILO, and has for years..Now that knowledge has been deprecated. Books will have to be rewritten, headaches arise, the whole nine yards will unfold as people have to sit down and digest yet another piece of Linux minutia..Why bother. LILO works. Sometimes switching one working part with another for only minimal gains is NOT a good idea..the situation doesn't mandate such changes.
The article itself talks about how the AI community et al can't stand the Loebner Prize...Its the equivalent of a Yahoo Internet Life Award. Minsky himself has offered a reward to anyone who can successfully convince Loebner to stop running the damn thing.
"Come meet all the sharks and carpetbaggers, reminisce about the good ol' days when it was still fun, and learn about the new and exciting ways they make money off your work!"
Ion Storm? Aren't those the guys who released that pile of executable diarrhea, "Daikatana"? This whole article reads like, "And now, from the people who brought you Daikatana... WE PRESENT TO YOU, THE FUTURE OF GAMING!!!"..Sounds to me like one last gasp of a company on the brink of failure trying desparately to associate its name to The Next Big Thing (tm)..Thanks, but no thanks..If Ion Storm has a hand in designing the future of games, I think i'll stick to Monopoly.
Cheers,
Actually, its not that impressive..
on
Talking Palm
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Voice synthesis (I dunno about voice analysis, however) has been around since the early 1960's. A few years ago, I picked up a CD called "Computer Music Currents, Vol. 13 : A History Of Digital Sound Synthesis" published by a German outfit called Wergo. It contained nothing but rare, early recordings of engineers trying to produce music with computers, with some attempts going back to the late 1950's.
Anyway, this CD came with a booklet, and an interesting story. Theres a famous scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL offers to sing "Daisy, Daisy, A Bicycle Built For Two" as he's dying. Arthur C. Clarke once visited AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1962 where he saw a demonstration of a "singing computer", in the form of an IBM 7094 Mainframe with voice synthesis capabilities. The engineers had taught the machine how to play the song, and then superimpose a synthesized voice ontop of it, in realtime. It impressed (or scared the shit out of him) enough that he chose to write it into the story, and what later became the film.
All of this was done under 128K of RAM, top to bottom.
The story also has an interesting anecdote about how many punched cards it took to pull it off-- Something like 28,000 paper punch cards if I remember correctly. The engineers (one of whom later turned out to be my C and x86 Assembly instructor in college) remembered there was some concern about how to transport them, that putting them in the back seat of a Volkswagon would crush the axles. Heheheh..
I'm so tired of the constant blathering of anti-government rhetoric on here I could puke.
Ever seen those t-shirts, or bumper stickers that say "We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us About" ? Well, guess what -- Our big terrible evil mean 'n nasty fascist secretive athiest Bilderberg-controlled masonic men in black loving government is the same fucking thing. Its composed of people like you and I, not evil robots that try to strip us of everything we own in some gigantic conspiracy to "ruuuule the wooooorld"...I swear to God, Slashdot should hand out aluminum foil helmets upon arrival. Between this garbage and the brain-vomit that comes out of YRO, it feels like i'm watching a cult in the making.
If the government were as truly evil as you think they are, they would have already killed you, or would have prevented you from being born in the first place, let alone let you (gasp) speak openly in public!
A healthy criticism of the government is a normal, and necessary part of any democracy. Fanatical raving about how the government is out to get you because you have a fucking program on your little computer is nothing short of pathetic.
My $0.02, moderate me however the hell you want. I could care less.
Sorry, gang, but this "innovation" seems utterly useless. Here's why.
1) Why do you need a GPS phone? If you don't know where you are, you ask, or buy a map for a buck or two. The only people who would ever buy a GPS phone are the same kinds of people who get confused looking at rotary telephones.
2) Paper maps don't run out of batteries, or break.
3) Paper maps wont cost you $30 a month.
4) There are plenty of Road Atlases available in bookstores, many of which provide comprehensive data on where you are and where you want to go. They cover every major metropolitan city in the world, streets and landmarks included, and cost a fraction of the amount of money you'de blow on a useless (not to mention difficult to read) GPS phone that will not only eat your batteries, but will eat your money.
5) The GPS doesn't provide you with any unique information. Your speed, distance and travel times can all be figured out in your head or on paper, probably in less time it takes you to fire up the damn thing and take a reading from satellites.
6) Only titanic idiots ever get themselves truly lost anyway. Trust me, I live near a forest preserve. Morons go in there all the time, totally unprepared, no maps, no money, no clue. If you suddenly find yourself so far away from civilization that you need to use a GPS to locate your position (nice fantasy world there, by the way) , you sure as hell aren't going to be able to place a cellphone call. There wont be any nearby towers to handle the call. Gee, didn't think about THAT one, didja?:)
7) A five-minute reading of any basic book on Astronomy will teach you how to find your location anywhere on earth, day or night.
You don't even need a magnetic compass.
So, who wants to step up to the plate and give me ONE irrefutable reason why ANYONE would NEED a GPS-Enabled Cell Phone?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone remember NewTek's DigiView Gold?
The mainstay of digitizing for the Amiga back in the late 80's and early 90's consisted of what amounted to a black and white security camera with a color wheel mounted infront of the lens. Not a new development here, kids. Besides that, as someone else pointed out, people have been taking RGB Composite photos for close to 100 years now.
"144 PB should be enough for anybody."
- Bowie J. Poag, November 7, 2001
If Gates were reprogrammable, then we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
my bad. it's 6, not 8. Highly toxic nonetheless.
Them: You should be afraid of nanotechnology getting into the wrong hands!
You: Well, ok...Why? Whats there to be afraid of? Isn't the whole idea circumvented by...
Them: Nanotechnology. Be afraid.
You: Huh? That doesn't answer my question.
Them: You should be afraid of nanotechnology.
You: Err...What?? You're just repeating yourself!! You haven't given me a reason why I...
Them: Yes. Nanotechnology--It could get into the wrong hands. Osama Bin Laden's hands!
You: How on earth is nanotechnology a threat to anyone? What, you think someones going to introduce some sort of synthetic nano-machine virus into the water supply? Come on.
Them: You need to be afraid of nanotechnology falling into the wrong hands. And the water supply
You: FINE. OK. Jeezus, lets say for the sake of the argument that some "evil organization" learns how to develop nanotechnology. Fine. What good is it going to do them? What are they going to build that would be such a terrible threat to anyone? Why not simply use standard, boring old chemistry tricks to kill people? Hasn't it ever occured to you that the idea of "death by nanotechnology" is about as sensical as "And now, Batman, I will spend millions of dollars to construct a machine that lower you very slowly into a pool of imported Burmese pirahna!!"
Them: You should be afraid of nanotechnology falling into the wrong hands.
You: Hasn't it occured to you that a single drop of benzene is enough to kill a room full of people? All Benzene is, is just a ring of 8 carbon atoms. It doesn't require a knowledge of nanotechnology to make a whole bucket of....
Them: You should be afraid of Osama Bin Laden, and nanotechnology. And benzene. And mail. And muslims. And cryptography. And steganography. And bridges. And...
You: {click}
Know whats funny?
I've been saying the same thing for years.
Only now are people beginning to believe me.
Yeah, it meant "learn how to fucking spell."
Having worked at IBM SSD here in Tucson, I can tell you for a fact that Big Blue takes their security very, very seriously.
I worked out on the floor -- Your typical raised-floor temperature controlled room, except on a very large scale. Without going into specifics, getting to work was always fun when it came to security. You have to go through a human checkpoint, then one card-access doorway, then another combination human/card-access doorway with a tailgate alarm.. At each point along the way you're monitored on cameras mounted in the ceiling Occasionally, if your badge doesn't work, a voice comes over the loudspeaker where you are and asks you to hold up your photo badge so they can confirm who you are before continuing.
My favorite story comes from one of my old floor bosses at IBM. He used to work for a defense contractor out east in New Jersey, right off the turnpike. He claims someone got busted sitting on a highway overpass with a camera and telescopic lens attachment, photographing the blackboards inside the plant. "Thats why all the exterior windows have reflective tint nowadays. Its a safety measure."
Fun stuff.. I miss IBM like you wouldn't believe. Friggin awesome company to work for.
Cheers,
Am, i'm glad to see this article. I used to be a huge fan of Command & Conquer, and have always loved the genre, that is, until each version of the game became a cookie-cutter tank blitz. If we're to model a game that uses real-world terrain, why not have real-world problems?
In real warfare, rivers need to be spanned with pontoons, trees need to be cut down, supplies need to be dropped ahead of advancing troops and huge swathes of land need to be cleared in order for it to be traversable by military equiptment.
Incorporating concepts like airdrops of food, oil and gasoline would be a good start. This would prevent the sort of mindless tank parade crap that ruins the fun of the game. If you want to make a tank parade, fine, make one, but you're also going to need to build an airstrip and a C-130 to airdrop supplies of fuel, oil, and food ahead of the parade so your troops dont starve to death, burn out the engines in their tanks, or run out of gas halfway to their targets.
Now, onto the fun stuff. The Geneva Convention forbids certain activities during warfare. It should be an option given to you as to whether or not you would like to risk violating the Geneva convention. I like being able to express my personality within the design of my armies, and the better games out there (i've found) allow me to incorporate that facet pretty easilly. Some things that come to mind are:
Prison Camps
Torture/Interrogation Buildings
Propaganda Broadcasts
Feild Hospitals
Unconventional Warfare (trebuchets, tunneling below ground, etc)
Infiltration
Famine
Atmospheric Issues (Snow, rain, etc)
Extensive R&D (huuuge possibility for new weapons development)
Cheers, and yes, PROPAGANDA is still running.
Here's a thought.
I sorta like what I saw in Konqueror not too long ago, the ability to present yourself to a server using several different browser identities.
This should be a standard feature of ALL browsers.
Prefaced, of course, with a little pop-up disclaimer stating that the subsequent content may not be displayed correctly, or securely.
Cheers, and yes, PROPAGANDA is still running..
A well-seasoned network admin friend of mine and I once had a conversation over dinner about an idea I had brewing -- An application that would attempt to guesstimate where you were on earth based on triangulating distances from known servers by means of measuring ping time. A small network database that contained, say, a hundred servers nationwide that constantly maintained a list of ping times to a hundred other machines would provide enough coverage and enough data to allow a single machine to guesstimate where it is on earth based upon simple trig.
The only problem with this idea is that A) Network latency times can change erratically from moment to moment, and B) Some nodes may even drop out of the network due to upgrades or flaming death. Depending upon how fine-grained the mesh is, and depending how accurate you want the guesstimate to be, you could be reasonably certain of at least being able to determine your location within a couple hundred miles.
Not useful for you and I, I know.. But it would be kinda cool if people could buy PCs, set up them straight out of the box, and the box goes out on the mesh and figures out where it is in the U.S., and sets the time accordingly, suggests local IPs, other stuff.
Amazing what you can discuss over a bacon cheeseburger, eh?
Cheers, and yes, PROPAGANDA is still up,
700KB for an HTML tag stripper? Come on.
Even Tinyapps' apps are somewhat bloated. Pong in 52 bytes -- Thats tiny. Not to mention, I wrote a full-featured image viewer for X11 that fades in any image from black, holds it according to a user-specified number of seconds, and fades it out. Its fast, flexible, well documented, and bug free. It has support for images as small as 1x1 to 32767x32767 in any depth, supports nearly a dozen different image formats, has wildcard support, scaling support, a controllable fader speed, and a verbose mode tossed in for the hell of it. Total weight of the binary?
Here's a tarball with the source and a precompiled binary, if you want it. Slideshow 1.1.
Cheers, and yes, PROPAGANDA is still running,
Don't commit any crimes, and you have nothing to worry about, clown.
Talk about "stupidity in its purest form"..yeesh.
You're becoming bitter, Rob. What a shame.
Theres alot that makes sense about this. Personally, I think virus writers should face prison time. Too many people get hurt when their work is destroyed. Its not a productivity issue--You can always keep working. Its when a virus nails something irreplacable, like data which hasn't encompassed by a backup or is otherwise made irrecoverable, thats the main issue.
The only problem with the idea is that I like the idea of "white hat" viruses, or virii that actually do constructive things like plug holes, or notify sysadmins of security breaches. Thats fine, and gentle mischeif like that is perfectly in keeping with the spirit of what makes the industry so interesting in the first place.
Lets try to distinguish between good viruses and bad viruses the same way as we're now beginning to distinguish between white hat hackers and black hat hackers, hm?
Cheers, and yes, PROPAGANDA is still running.
Its true, GRUB is a superior bootloader. But good, i'm glad to see that at least a choice is provided. Old folks like us cut our teeth on LILO, and have gotten to know it fairly well over the years..if I have the option to stick with it, I will.
But it may just as well be.
I've been using RH since 2.0.27 on a 386SX/12, and like many of you, have stuck with Red Hat in one form or another for many years. However, recently Red Hat's distrib has begun to suffer, largely because of oddball decisions like the ones we're seeing in 7.2.
LILO has been replaced with GRUB. Why? So we can confuse things even more for the people who we're trying to attract to the platform? If it aint broke, don't fix it, gang. You have an installed user base that knows the ins and outs of LILO, and has for years..Now that knowledge has been deprecated. Books will have to be rewritten, headaches arise, the whole nine yards will unfold as people have to sit down and digest yet another piece of Linux minutia..Why bother. LILO works. Sometimes switching one working part with another for only minimal gains is NOT a good idea..the situation doesn't mandate such changes.
Cheers, and yes, PROPAGANDA is still running,
We need to go to Mars. Manned. And golf.
It would be a great way for this country to get happy again.
Cheers,
The article itself talks about how the AI community et al can't stand the Loebner Prize...Its the equivalent of a Yahoo Internet Life Award. Minsky himself has offered a reward to anyone who can successfully convince Loebner to stop running the damn thing.
Cheers,
I can see the headlines on the brochures now:
"Come meet all the sharks and carpetbaggers, reminisce about the good ol' days when it was still fun, and learn about the new and exciting ways they make money off your work!"
No thanks. I think i'll pass on this one.
Ion Storm? Aren't those the guys who released that pile of executable diarrhea, "Daikatana"? This whole article reads like, "And now, from the people who brought you Daikatana... WE PRESENT TO YOU, THE FUTURE OF GAMING!!!"
Cheers,
Voice synthesis (I dunno about voice analysis, however) has been around since the early 1960's. A few years ago, I picked up a CD called "Computer Music Currents, Vol. 13 : A History Of Digital Sound Synthesis" published by a German outfit called Wergo. It contained nothing but rare, early recordings of engineers trying to produce music with computers, with some attempts going back to the late 1950's.
Anyway, this CD came with a booklet, and an interesting story. Theres a famous scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL offers to sing "Daisy, Daisy, A Bicycle Built For Two" as he's dying. Arthur C. Clarke once visited AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1962 where he saw a demonstration of a "singing computer", in the form of an IBM 7094 Mainframe with voice synthesis capabilities. The engineers had taught the machine how to play the song, and then superimpose a synthesized voice ontop of it, in realtime. It impressed (or scared the shit out of him) enough that he chose to write it into the story, and what later became the film.
All of this was done under 128K of RAM, top to bottom.
The story also has an interesting anecdote about how many punched cards it took to pull it off-- Something like 28,000 paper punch cards if I remember correctly. The engineers (one of whom later turned out to be my C and x86 Assembly instructor in college) remembered there was some concern about how to transport them, that putting them in the back seat of a Volkswagon would crush the axles. Heheheh..
Cheers,
My god, I didn't think it was possible. Someone actually provided me with a good reason why GPS-equipped cell phones might be useful.
Congratulations. You've impressed me.
I'm so tired of the constant blathering of anti-government rhetoric on here I could puke.
Ever seen those t-shirts, or bumper stickers that say "We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us About" ? Well, guess what -- Our big terrible evil mean 'n nasty fascist secretive athiest Bilderberg-controlled masonic men in black loving government is the same fucking thing. Its composed of people like you and I, not evil robots that try to strip us of everything we own in some gigantic conspiracy to "ruuuule the wooooorld"...I swear to God, Slashdot should hand out aluminum foil helmets upon arrival. Between this garbage and the brain-vomit that comes out of YRO, it feels like i'm watching a cult in the making.
If the government were as truly evil as you think they are, they would have already killed you, or would have prevented you from being born in the first place, let alone let you (gasp) speak openly in public!
A healthy criticism of the government is a normal, and necessary part of any democracy. Fanatical raving about how the government is out to get you because you have a fucking program on your little computer is nothing short of pathetic.
My $0.02, moderate me however the hell you want. I could care less.
Sorry, gang, but this "innovation" seems utterly useless. Here's why.
1) Why do you need a GPS phone? If you don't know where you are, you ask, or buy a map for a buck or two. The only people who would ever buy a GPS phone are the same kinds of people who get confused looking at rotary telephones.
2) Paper maps don't run out of batteries, or break.
3) Paper maps wont cost you $30 a month.
4) There are plenty of Road Atlases available in bookstores, many of which provide comprehensive data on where you are and where you want to go. They cover every major metropolitan city in the world, streets and landmarks included, and cost a fraction of the amount of money you'de blow on a useless (not to mention difficult to read) GPS phone that will not only eat your batteries, but will eat your money.
5) The GPS doesn't provide you with any unique information. Your speed, distance and travel times can all be figured out in your head or on paper, probably in less time it takes you to fire up the damn thing and take a reading from satellites.
6) Only titanic idiots ever get themselves truly lost anyway. Trust me, I live near a forest preserve. Morons go in there all the time, totally unprepared, no maps, no money, no clue. If you suddenly find yourself so far away from civilization that you need to use a GPS to locate your position (nice fantasy world there, by the way) , you sure as hell aren't going to be able to place a cellphone call. There wont be any nearby towers to handle the call. Gee, didn't think about THAT one, didja?
7) A five-minute reading of any basic book on Astronomy will teach you how to find your location anywhere on earth, day or night.
You don't even need a magnetic compass.
So, who wants to step up to the plate and give me ONE irrefutable reason why ANYONE would NEED a GPS-Enabled Cell Phone?
Cheers, (and yes, PROPAGANDA is still running,