Remember that Verizon is claiming in court that it has a free speech right to censor all Internet traffic across its networks. That's right, their censorship of your free speech is their free speech. And corporations, of course, have stronger free speech rights than individuals. So claims Verizon. Before federal courts that sometimes think like that themselves.
Personally, I use Sprint's networks, but through Ting. Their 3G coverage is decent in the more populated parts of rural New England (that is larger towns: good, and not overburdended; truly rural: mostly lacking). And when I go into the big cities, WiMAX works fine from most locations (and where it doesn't due to local geography, 3G is okay). We have two Android phones, use the no-extra-charge tethering frequently, and run a total bill as low as $20 a month - as compared to, what, approaching $200 a month for the two phones if on Verizon's or Sprint's plans?
I was on Sprint for voice for many years before this. They were always good. Every customer service call I made to them was well handled. I've only gone to Ting because for our usage patterns (limited voice, no texting, Internet by phone for e-mail and static web pages - our streaming needs are met by DSL at home) result in such huge savings there, while still giving us phones we can tether from.
Two phones: $12. 4 GB: $82.50. 500 minutes: $9. 1000 texts: $5. Total: $108.50. Sprint 3G and WiMax for the data. Free CDMA roaming for the voice (so includes Verizon coverage). Rates vary by month according to actual usage. No contract. But you need to buy the phones up front. And you can go to a data only plan, shutting off voice and text entirely if you want.
Ting (part of Tucows) is $6 per-device per-month. Any number of devices per account. Plus usage. No extra fee for teathering. They're on Sprint's network for data (3G and WiMax-type 4G currently). And on any available CDMA network (e.g. Verizon as well as Sprint) for voice. You have to buy the phones full price up front. But the selection's decent. And the usage fees end up being way cheaper for my wife and I than our previous separate Sprint contract and Trac prepaid accounts came to. In fact it's coming in cheaper than the previous single voice-only contract on Sprint. The teathering is a very nice feature - there's not wifi everywhere yet. If you want to watch feature-length movies on mobile I'm sure it could get up into Verizon's pricing range. But for static Web content (like reading/.) it's pretty impossible to run the data charges up anywhere near there.
The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence.
The premise here is that "introspection" (a vague name for a wide range of practices) cannot reveal unconscious biases, bring them into consciousness, and enable self-analysis and intelligent adjustment of them. We are to accept this premise why? In my experience, it's quite possible to gain a conscious vantage on previously-unconscious biases, and subsequently lessen and/or compensate for them. If Lehrer can't do the same, maybe he isn't very good at introspection. No reason to condemn an activity others do well and productively just because you suck at it, Jonah.
Pointing out that Asian tribes generally have higher IQs than Caucasian tribes is racist, my friend. Even if it is the case that the Gods decree that the highest IQ tribes shall with every right enslave the rest....
Spending their own money, they wouldn't be creating advanced buzz. This way when they take their product to market they can say "See, we've already got all these people invested in it." And every investor will make sure to see it... with friends.
If these kids are concerned about the climate's future, shouldn't they be studying ways to better predict and manage the climate?
We have finely-honed ways to predict the climate. They converge to predict serious danger ahead. We also have a great deal of knowledge of ways to head off that danger -- primarily by reducing carbon emissions. Now, the students might want to do psychological studies about why we have the knowledge and the means but refuse to act. There's a lot to learn about why we're such stupid lemmings, victims of propaganda by the likes of Exxon and the rest of the vested interests, who believe that their descendants in private hilltop estates can hold off the catastrophy, or else believe nothing of the future at all, but see only the short term profits.
But what's wrong the filing suit? Anything to cut through the mass madness and inertia on this danger is good. There's been more TV coverage of Donald Trump than global warming over the last year in America. We are truly a decadent civizilation, and truly fucked if we don't wake up from this.
The only thing we can reasonably assume, is that thought exists.
Aren't you assuming assumption exists there? Okay, assumption might be a subcategory of thought. So, reasonably, we can think thought exists. We're also thinking that "reasonably" means something. Well, reason is a category of thought too. So most of the "only reasonable assumption: that thought exists" is saying not much more than "We think we think." Okay. But notice what's not about thought or it's subcategories in that sentence: "We." So presumably we can reasonably assume - or more than assume - "we." After all, who is the "reasonable assumption" even of consequence for besides us?
Now that we've got "us" as a reasonable assumption - or even something more certain than that - there's the question of "Where are we?" Well, it might be a lot more reasonable to assume we're in a world that consists of more than thoughts about thoughts. A reality consisting solely of thoughts about thoughts would lead to an incredible degree of tail chasing. It's hard to think why it would ever seem either as substantial as the world - why not just be mixed up like our dreams usually are? - or as truly surprising to us - whether pleasantly or unpleasantly - as the world often is in our experience.
Also I'd venture assuming the world is real correlates with a longer life expectancy than assuming only thoughts are. Perhaps that's just a thought....
As Jon Stewart pointed out last night: Hitler believed an international banking conspiracy threatened to destroy Europe. Today there's an internal banking conspiracy threatening to destroy Europe... and it's led by the Germans!
Heartland believes there's a conspiracy to falsify science threatening to destroy civilisation as we know it. Today Heartland's conspiracy to falsify science is threatening to destroy civilisation as we know it.
What state do you live in where your state reps have "a couple layers of minions"? Just curious. I'm in Vermont. State reps and senators have no personal staff at all. So a software program that could sort original communnications from ditto'd ones would be quite helpful. My state senator's getting several hundred emails a day. All but a few are mass produced stuff she'd as soon pay relatively less attention to than the individual communications. But she's not good at sorting them herself. So she was hoping I could suggest a software solution for her.
Is it too much to expect Slashdot denizens to be knowledgeable and creative about software solutions to common problems? Since nobody seems to recognize this one as something that already has solutions out there, maybe someone could be inspired to write one to fill the gap? Yeah, it would be beautiful if I could. But I'm a Linux guy, and don't have the background to write extensions to the Windows or Mac mail readers. There has to be an opportunity there for someone, though. I'm sure lots of businesses would like to be able to sort their incoming email along these lines too, since they too get targetted by the same political websites that organize mass attacks on politicians' email inboxes.
Jesus H. I ask about software solutions that a state senator, who here in Vermont has no staff at all other than some shared staffers who help the senate function when in session, might implement. A software solution to sorting individual e-mails from canned ones. Yes, why shouldn't we have the efficiency of email here? And no, she does not have a legislative office. I'm in Vermont. It's a citizen legislature. And yes, I know her socially. But not so closely I can just drop in on her home. She told me personally about the flood of email, and asked if I knew of a way she could automatically sort out the mass emailings from the individual constituent letters. So I passed the query on to Slashdot.
This is obviously technologically achievable. There are for instance the sites for teachers that, if you feed in student papers, can spot plagerism. This is almost exactly the same problem: Identify the incoming emails that contain largely plagerized (or at least unoriginal) text, and put them in a queue separate from the ones that don't. I was hoping that someone would say, "Ah yes, there's a package out there that does it." Evidently not. And how does wanting to help her cut through the clutter of email to get to the real messages constitute a problem with my ego? (Look in the mirror, daemonenwind.)
In America you can buy a phone from TIng with only a month-to-month contract. But the phone basically will only work on TIng (which uses Sprint's and Clearwire's networks). So it's still a bit of a commitment and up front cost. The monthly cost though can end up far cheaper than being on the big carriers' contract plans, even factoring in the initial cost of the phone, since Ting charges for actual use each month. And the phones Ting offers are some of the better Android models, as compared to the prepaid stuff. Plus the prepaid phones don't seem to ever offer 4G. Most of the Ting phones have 4G (well, WiMAX), and tethering other devices is at no extra charge.
Thing is, the modern Republicans demand strict conformity to an arbitrary standard of political correctness. If you miss out in any dimension, you're a "Republican In Name Only" and they'd rather expel you from their gated paradise.
It goes along with their moral relativism, where Romney's health care plan designed by the Heritage Foundation becomes "unconstitutional" when promoted nationally by Obama - not because it's morphed into something other than Heritage and Romney designed, but because it was passed by Democrats, and so is guilty by association with them.
The GOP used to be a diverse group of free thinkers who highly valued liberty. It's become a conformist cult that worships only power, whose only allegiance to liberty is wanting the world to be free from any power or influence other than their own. Which is tragic. We'd be far better off with at least two viable parties competing to truly server the interests of the majority of citizens. We need better Republicans, badly. Or else we need them to go the way of the Whigs and a new, better party to arise.
Stuart Hameroff is an organizer of this conference, which I'm sure this research was timed for release just before. Stuart has long been an advocate of a theory he developed with Roger Penrose in which the microtubules are the brain's interface with the quantum.
I had a plain old cell phone for years on Sprint, and never liked the phoney "regulatory recapture" fees. Nor did I want to start paying $100 a month just to have a smartphone. Their network, in places I tend to be, is good though. So I dropped Sprint and went to Ting, where you pay for your phone up front (no subsidy), but then for voice/text/data pay by actual usage, with nothing extra for the WiMAX flavor of 4G, or for using the phone as a wi-fi hub to tether other devices. Since I'm not a huge mobile data user (plenty of free wi-fi around usually) I don't text, and don't love talking on the phone, it looks like for about what I was paying just for the old cell phone I now have the wi-fi hub feature, plus something the kid can play Angry Birds on.
Ting doesn't have iPhones - not that I'd want one. But it's phones are better than most low-cost providers'. And I have no idea if they'll be able to follow Sprint into LTE, or remain stuck in WiMAX. But the other low-cost providers are stuck in 3G, so WiMAX is a nice advantage for now.
And if you want the fastest LTE, Clearwire - Sprint's WiMAX provider - still has a lot of higher frequency spectrum that it's beginning its LTE buildout on. Higher frequency (than the other LTE nets) makes for less range from tower, but it also makes for much greater bandwidth.
This all comes down to a race against a cash crunch that's facing both Clearwire and Sprint (and Sprint's building its own LTE, not just planning to rent Clearwire's - and it has lower, wider-coverage frequencies to spare for that due to phasing out old Nextel tech). But if they can find the cash between them to do the buildout they plan for the next couple of years, Sprint will end up with a faster network, particularly in major cities, than Verizon, and competitive coverage elsewhere.
There's also a lot of animosity towards Verizon as a corporation that will make some of us look to competitors. Their treatment of unions, collusion with cable providers in pursuit of effective monopoly, handoff of landline service in Northern New England to an underfunded and incompetent successor - may have no relation to the quality of their LTE net, but it earns them enemies that Sprint may not have.
Have you looked at the ones they arrest for "plotting"? They're looking for guys dumb enough, when the federal provacateur shows up, to make up fantasies about all the things they'd like to see explode. But they wouldn't want to encourage anyone along those lines who was, you know, smart enough to actually carry it off if the operation went out of control.
Isn't this an obvious attempt to suppress publication of data that will likely lead to mining companies having to pay in full for the health consequences of what until now have been cost-cutting practices that only save money as long as they don't have to pay for the cancers that result? Having one judge in the Deep South who goes along with this attempt at suppressing both science and the rights of mine workers to a healthy work environment show only that our courts too are deeply corrupt - something we've known at least since Bush v. Gore. It hardly means the judge in question, or the law firm firmly on the side of evil here, deserve any respect. The journals should publish this data, aggressively, and assert First Amendment rights to do so.
So apparently, computers are inadequate to doing physics - something Penrose famously claimed. If so, does this - as Penrose also claimed - prove that consciousness cannot be, at root, computational, since we can do physics (not speaking for myself here) fairly well?
Or to restate that, whatever our intelligence, in full, is, computers can't do it. Thus the whole prospect of the purported "singularity" is a mirrage - however much some may be taken in by it. There might be some similar prospect where we breed super-intelligent human beings - or dogs for that matter. But it's just not ever going to happen with machines.
There's good evidence that all these "attention-deficit" drugs are only of real benefit for a few weeks, after which continued use only makes sense for avoiding the sometimes-serious withdrawal symptoms. In other words, while use of aphetamines for ADD appeared to make medical sense once upon a time, more recent research shows that they whole thing is a bit of a fraud being run for the profit of the drug companies, with no net contribution at all to public well-being, or student performance, or anything else beyond maintaining a large, profitable population of addicts. Sure if you stop taking it you feel worse for a while, and if you start again you feel better. That's what addiction is.
If you're an adult taking them yourself, make your own judgment. If you're cooperating with a school in dosing your kid though, seriously consider setting a time and place for the kid to go cold turkey. You're doing nobody a real favor by keeping your kid on speed.
Ethics are basic to human nature - even to animal nature. Rats will put sharing with other rats ahead of their own gluttony. Two year old kids will play fairly with each other even when adults aren't watching, and get mad if any of the other kids breaks the assumed rules of equitability. Adults with no ethical grounding - true socipaths - exist, but in the pure form of that are quite rare. All businesses are in part based on trust. For trust to have a basis, there has to be at least "honor among thieves." If you're doing business in Scandinavia you'll likely find it's honor all the way through. If you're in Southern Italy or China, it's honor, but largely among those with whom you share some sort of family connection. In the US presently it's honor among those who went to the right universities - thus Obama's Harvard people won't bust the banking Harvard people for a broad menu of fraudulent acts against, well, people who didn't go to the Ivys. So we may not like it, but it's an ethic. Harvard people can trust each other to cover their backs. Scandinavian people can trust each other to cover their backs. Even rats and two year olds can. They've all got ethics. The only question is how expansive they are, who is within the charmed circle.
When Henry Ford paid his workers several times what he had to, that was ethics. Worked out well for all concerned. It's a totally viable business plan to be ethical with everyone. The current state of the world economy would not be such if American and European banks had been ethical, rather than carrying out massive fraud assured that their old-school peers in politics would back them. Lack of ethics is destroying capitalism. Pretending that ethics is incompatible, and should be cast off by corporations, is at the heart of the problem.
Verizon told the state to screw, and sold everything to Fairpoint and pulled out entirely. The end result? Not a single new town in the state has fiber service, everyone who had it has dramatically lower quality service, and Verizon avoids a money pit. Everyone loses except Verizon.
Interesting theory. But Verizon got out of the landline business in Vermont and Maine at the same time, because Verizon just didn't want to be in the landline business, coupled with a huge tax advantage they got in transferring debt to Fairpoint, which predictably went through bankruptcy afterwards to shed itself of that debt.
Your theory that universal phone or electrical or internet service in rural America is unfairly subsidized by urban dwellers is also debatable. The value of your phone is greater if you can call even your rural relatives with it. The value of internet commerce is greater if goods are available to and from those in rural areas. And the cost of your big-city rent is lower than it would be if people like me weren't working remotely from rural communities, using the available electricity, phone and internet connections, but instead had to move into the center cities to work.
Without universal services, the overall economy would be smaller, so there'd be less cake to share as wages for city workers, your rent would be higher, because far more of us would have to live in the city to work our trades, and you might save a few bucks a month on your phone bill. Overall, that's a big loss.
Please sell me an EMF pulse gun to use against any drone flying in my airspace.
BTW, what is a property owner's airspace? How high from the ground does "No Trespassing" apply? It has to be more than just a few inches from the ground. How much more?
First off, glaciers are never just stable. They're always growing and shrinking locally, due to differences in local climate. So it's not proof that the Earth as a whole was warmer in some past period, just because something from that past period has been found as a glacier recedes now.
Proof of the Earth as a whole gaining or losing temperature comes from looking at what the world's glaciers, as a whole, not individually, are doing. Right now they're rapidly melting, pretty much everywhere they exist. This is not entirely from greenhouse heating. Black soot from fires (largely ours) also lands on glaciers and cause them to absorb more heat from the sun. But it's happening, nearly everywhere, rapidly.
Now, the thing about the Greenland glaciers is they can take ice cores and fairly accurately date the ice. And the current glaciers are far older than the Vikings. It's not plausible that Greenland had no ice just a few centuries back and then suddenly the glaciers formed, because those glaciers are known to be many thousands of years old.
And, like glaciers just about everywhere, they're melting now with surprising rapidity.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that Verizon is claiming in court that it has a free speech right to censor all Internet traffic across its networks. That's right, their censorship of your free speech is their free speech. And corporations, of course, have stronger free speech rights than individuals. So claims Verizon. Before federal courts that sometimes think like that themselves.
Personally, I use Sprint's networks, but through Ting. Their 3G coverage is decent in the more populated parts of rural New England (that is larger towns: good, and not overburdended; truly rural: mostly lacking). And when I go into the big cities, WiMAX works fine from most locations (and where it doesn't due to local geography, 3G is okay). We have two Android phones, use the no-extra-charge tethering frequently, and run a total bill as low as $20 a month - as compared to, what, approaching $200 a month for the two phones if on Verizon's or Sprint's plans?
I was on Sprint for voice for many years before this. They were always good. Every customer service call I made to them was well handled. I've only gone to Ting because for our usage patterns (limited voice, no texting, Internet by phone for e-mail and static web pages - our streaming needs are met by DSL at home) result in such huge savings there, while still giving us phones we can tether from.
Two phones: $12. 4 GB: $82.50. 500 minutes: $9. 1000 texts: $5. Total: $108.50. Sprint 3G and WiMax for the data. Free CDMA roaming for the voice (so includes Verizon coverage). Rates vary by month according to actual usage. No contract. But you need to buy the phones up front. And you can go to a data only plan, shutting off voice and text entirely if you want.
Ting (part of Tucows) is $6 per-device per-month. Any number of devices per account. Plus usage. No extra fee for teathering. They're on Sprint's network for data (3G and WiMax-type 4G currently). And on any available CDMA network (e.g. Verizon as well as Sprint) for voice. You have to buy the phones full price up front. But the selection's decent. And the usage fees end up being way cheaper for my wife and I than our previous separate Sprint contract and Trac prepaid accounts came to. In fact it's coming in cheaper than the previous single voice-only contract on Sprint. The teathering is a very nice feature - there's not wifi everywhere yet. If you want to watch feature-length movies on mobile I'm sure it could get up into Verizon's pricing range. But for static Web content (like reading /.) it's pretty impossible to run the data charges up anywhere near there.
The premise here is that "introspection" (a vague name for a wide range of practices) cannot reveal unconscious biases, bring them into consciousness, and enable self-analysis and intelligent adjustment of them. We are to accept this premise why? In my experience, it's quite possible to gain a conscious vantage on previously-unconscious biases, and subsequently lessen and/or compensate for them. If Lehrer can't do the same, maybe he isn't very good at introspection. No reason to condemn an activity others do well and productively just because you suck at it, Jonah.
Pointing out that Asian tribes generally have higher IQs than Caucasian tribes is racist, my friend. Even if it is the case that the Gods decree that the highest IQ tribes shall with every right enslave the rest....
Spending their own money, they wouldn't be creating advanced buzz. This way when they take their product to market they can say "See, we've already got all these people invested in it." And every investor will make sure to see it ... with friends.
We have finely-honed ways to predict the climate. They converge to predict serious danger ahead. We also have a great deal of knowledge of ways to head off that danger -- primarily by reducing carbon emissions. Now, the students might want to do psychological studies about why we have the knowledge and the means but refuse to act. There's a lot to learn about why we're such stupid lemmings, victims of propaganda by the likes of Exxon and the rest of the vested interests, who believe that their descendants in private hilltop estates can hold off the catastrophy, or else believe nothing of the future at all, but see only the short term profits.
But what's wrong the filing suit? Anything to cut through the mass madness and inertia on this danger is good. There's been more TV coverage of Donald Trump than global warming over the last year in America. We are truly a decadent civizilation, and truly fucked if we don't wake up from this.
The only thing we can reasonably assume, is that thought exists.
Aren't you assuming assumption exists there? Okay, assumption might be a subcategory of thought. So, reasonably, we can think thought exists. We're also thinking that "reasonably" means something. Well, reason is a category of thought too. So most of the "only reasonable assumption: that thought exists" is saying not much more than "We think we think." Okay. But notice what's not about thought or it's subcategories in that sentence: "We." So presumably we can reasonably assume - or more than assume - "we." After all, who is the "reasonable assumption" even of consequence for besides us?
Now that we've got "us" as a reasonable assumption - or even something more certain than that - there's the question of "Where are we?" Well, it might be a lot more reasonable to assume we're in a world that consists of more than thoughts about thoughts. A reality consisting solely of thoughts about thoughts would lead to an incredible degree of tail chasing. It's hard to think why it would ever seem either as substantial as the world - why not just be mixed up like our dreams usually are? - or as truly surprising to us - whether pleasantly or unpleasantly - as the world often is in our experience.
Also I'd venture assuming the world is real correlates with a longer life expectancy than assuming only thoughts are. Perhaps that's just a thought....
As Jon Stewart pointed out last night: Hitler believed an international banking conspiracy threatened to destroy Europe. Today there's an internal banking conspiracy threatening to destroy Europe ... and it's led by the Germans!
Heartland believes there's a conspiracy to falsify science threatening to destroy civilisation as we know it. Today Heartland's conspiracy to falsify science is threatening to destroy civilisation as we know it.
Oh the irony?!
What state do you live in where your state reps have "a couple layers of minions"? Just curious. I'm in Vermont. State reps and senators have no personal staff at all. So a software program that could sort original communnications from ditto'd ones would be quite helpful. My state senator's getting several hundred emails a day. All but a few are mass produced stuff she'd as soon pay relatively less attention to than the individual communications. But she's not good at sorting them herself. So she was hoping I could suggest a software solution for her.
Is it too much to expect Slashdot denizens to be knowledgeable and creative about software solutions to common problems? Since nobody seems to recognize this one as something that already has solutions out there, maybe someone could be inspired to write one to fill the gap? Yeah, it would be beautiful if I could. But I'm a Linux guy, and don't have the background to write extensions to the Windows or Mac mail readers. There has to be an opportunity there for someone, though. I'm sure lots of businesses would like to be able to sort their incoming email along these lines too, since they too get targetted by the same political websites that organize mass attacks on politicians' email inboxes.
Jesus H. I ask about software solutions that a state senator, who here in Vermont has no staff at all other than some shared staffers who help the senate function when in session, might implement. A software solution to sorting individual e-mails from canned ones. Yes, why shouldn't we have the efficiency of email here? And no, she does not have a legislative office. I'm in Vermont. It's a citizen legislature. And yes, I know her socially. But not so closely I can just drop in on her home. She told me personally about the flood of email, and asked if I knew of a way she could automatically sort out the mass emailings from the individual constituent letters. So I passed the query on to Slashdot.
This is obviously technologically achievable. There are for instance the sites for teachers that, if you feed in student papers, can spot plagerism. This is almost exactly the same problem: Identify the incoming emails that contain largely plagerized (or at least unoriginal) text, and put them in a queue separate from the ones that don't. I was hoping that someone would say, "Ah yes, there's a package out there that does it." Evidently not. And how does wanting to help her cut through the clutter of email to get to the real messages constitute a problem with my ego? (Look in the mirror, daemonenwind.)
In America you can buy a phone from TIng with only a month-to-month contract. But the phone basically will only work on TIng (which uses Sprint's and Clearwire's networks). So it's still a bit of a commitment and up front cost. The monthly cost though can end up far cheaper than being on the big carriers' contract plans, even factoring in the initial cost of the phone, since Ting charges for actual use each month. And the phones Ting offers are some of the better Android models, as compared to the prepaid stuff. Plus the prepaid phones don't seem to ever offer 4G. Most of the Ting phones have 4G (well, WiMAX), and tethering other devices is at no extra charge.
Thing is, the modern Republicans demand strict conformity to an arbitrary standard of political correctness. If you miss out in any dimension, you're a "Republican In Name Only" and they'd rather expel you from their gated paradise.
It goes along with their moral relativism, where Romney's health care plan designed by the Heritage Foundation becomes "unconstitutional" when promoted nationally by Obama - not because it's morphed into something other than Heritage and Romney designed, but because it was passed by Democrats, and so is guilty by association with them.
The GOP used to be a diverse group of free thinkers who highly valued liberty. It's become a conformist cult that worships only power, whose only allegiance to liberty is wanting the world to be free from any power or influence other than their own. Which is tragic. We'd be far better off with at least two viable parties competing to truly server the interests of the majority of citizens. We need better Republicans, badly. Or else we need them to go the way of the Whigs and a new, better party to arise.
Stuart Hameroff is an organizer of this conference, which I'm sure this research was timed for release just before. Stuart has long been an advocate of a theory he developed with Roger Penrose in which the microtubules are the brain's interface with the quantum.
I had a plain old cell phone for years on Sprint, and never liked the phoney "regulatory recapture" fees. Nor did I want to start paying $100 a month just to have a smartphone. Their network, in places I tend to be, is good though. So I dropped Sprint and went to Ting, where you pay for your phone up front (no subsidy), but then for voice/text/data pay by actual usage, with nothing extra for the WiMAX flavor of 4G, or for using the phone as a wi-fi hub to tether other devices. Since I'm not a huge mobile data user (plenty of free wi-fi around usually) I don't text, and don't love talking on the phone, it looks like for about what I was paying just for the old cell phone I now have the wi-fi hub feature, plus something the kid can play Angry Birds on.
Ting doesn't have iPhones - not that I'd want one. But it's phones are better than most low-cost providers'. And I have no idea if they'll be able to follow Sprint into LTE, or remain stuck in WiMAX. But the other low-cost providers are stuck in 3G, so WiMAX is a nice advantage for now.
And if you want the fastest LTE, Clearwire - Sprint's WiMAX provider - still has a lot of higher frequency spectrum that it's beginning its LTE buildout on. Higher frequency (than the other LTE nets) makes for less range from tower, but it also makes for much greater bandwidth.
This all comes down to a race against a cash crunch that's facing both Clearwire and Sprint (and Sprint's building its own LTE, not just planning to rent Clearwire's - and it has lower, wider-coverage frequencies to spare for that due to phasing out old Nextel tech). But if they can find the cash between them to do the buildout they plan for the next couple of years, Sprint will end up with a faster network, particularly in major cities, than Verizon, and competitive coverage elsewhere.
There's also a lot of animosity towards Verizon as a corporation that will make some of us look to competitors. Their treatment of unions, collusion with cable providers in pursuit of effective monopoly, handoff of landline service in Northern New England to an underfunded and incompetent successor - may have no relation to the quality of their LTE net, but it earns them enemies that Sprint may not have.
Have you looked at the ones they arrest for "plotting"? They're looking for guys dumb enough, when the federal provacateur shows up, to make up fantasies about all the things they'd like to see explode. But they wouldn't want to encourage anyone along those lines who was, you know, smart enough to actually carry it off if the operation went out of control.
Isn't this an obvious attempt to suppress publication of data that will likely lead to mining companies having to pay in full for the health consequences of what until now have been cost-cutting practices that only save money as long as they don't have to pay for the cancers that result? Having one judge in the Deep South who goes along with this attempt at suppressing both science and the rights of mine workers to a healthy work environment show only that our courts too are deeply corrupt - something we've known at least since Bush v. Gore. It hardly means the judge in question, or the law firm firmly on the side of evil here, deserve any respect. The journals should publish this data, aggressively, and assert First Amendment rights to do so.
So apparently, computers are inadequate to doing physics - something Penrose famously claimed. If so, does this - as Penrose also claimed - prove that consciousness cannot be, at root, computational, since we can do physics (not speaking for myself here) fairly well?
Or to restate that, whatever our intelligence, in full, is, computers can't do it. Thus the whole prospect of the purported "singularity" is a mirrage - however much some may be taken in by it. There might be some similar prospect where we breed super-intelligent human beings - or dogs for that matter. But it's just not ever going to happen with machines.
Why? Because machines can't do NP-hard stuff.
There's good evidence that all these "attention-deficit" drugs are only of real benefit for a few weeks, after which continued use only makes sense for avoiding the sometimes-serious withdrawal symptoms. In other words, while use of aphetamines for ADD appeared to make medical sense once upon a time, more recent research shows that they whole thing is a bit of a fraud being run for the profit of the drug companies, with no net contribution at all to public well-being, or student performance, or anything else beyond maintaining a large, profitable population of addicts. Sure if you stop taking it you feel worse for a while, and if you start again you feel better. That's what addiction is.
If you're an adult taking them yourself, make your own judgment. If you're cooperating with a school in dosing your kid though, seriously consider setting a time and place for the kid to go cold turkey. You're doing nobody a real favor by keeping your kid on speed.
Ethics are basic to human nature - even to animal nature. Rats will put sharing with other rats ahead of their own gluttony. Two year old kids will play fairly with each other even when adults aren't watching, and get mad if any of the other kids breaks the assumed rules of equitability. Adults with no ethical grounding - true socipaths - exist, but in the pure form of that are quite rare. All businesses are in part based on trust. For trust to have a basis, there has to be at least "honor among thieves." If you're doing business in Scandinavia you'll likely find it's honor all the way through. If you're in Southern Italy or China, it's honor, but largely among those with whom you share some sort of family connection. In the US presently it's honor among those who went to the right universities - thus Obama's Harvard people won't bust the banking Harvard people for a broad menu of fraudulent acts against, well, people who didn't go to the Ivys. So we may not like it, but it's an ethic. Harvard people can trust each other to cover their backs. Scandinavian people can trust each other to cover their backs. Even rats and two year olds can. They've all got ethics. The only question is how expansive they are, who is within the charmed circle.
When Henry Ford paid his workers several times what he had to, that was ethics. Worked out well for all concerned. It's a totally viable business plan to be ethical with everyone. The current state of the world economy would not be such if American and European banks had been ethical, rather than carrying out massive fraud assured that their old-school peers in politics would back them. Lack of ethics is destroying capitalism. Pretending that ethics is incompatible, and should be cast off by corporations, is at the heart of the problem.
I've always preferred a classical soundtrack for my rage. De gustibus. Hope this encourages the modern kids to acquire the taste.
Interesting theory. But Verizon got out of the landline business in Vermont and Maine at the same time, because Verizon just didn't want to be in the landline business, coupled with a huge tax advantage they got in transferring debt to Fairpoint, which predictably went through bankruptcy afterwards to shed itself of that debt.
Your theory that universal phone or electrical or internet service in rural America is unfairly subsidized by urban dwellers is also debatable. The value of your phone is greater if you can call even your rural relatives with it. The value of internet commerce is greater if goods are available to and from those in rural areas. And the cost of your big-city rent is lower than it would be if people like me weren't working remotely from rural communities, using the available electricity, phone and internet connections, but instead had to move into the center cities to work.
Without universal services, the overall economy would be smaller, so there'd be less cake to share as wages for city workers, your rent would be higher, because far more of us would have to live in the city to work our trades, and you might save a few bucks a month on your phone bill. Overall, that's a big loss.
Please sell me an EMF pulse gun to use against any drone flying in my airspace.
BTW, what is a property owner's airspace? How high from the ground does "No Trespassing" apply? It has to be more than just a few inches from the ground. How much more?
First off, glaciers are never just stable. They're always growing and shrinking locally, due to differences in local climate. So it's not proof that the Earth as a whole was warmer in some past period, just because something from that past period has been found as a glacier recedes now.
Proof of the Earth as a whole gaining or losing temperature comes from looking at what the world's glaciers, as a whole, not individually, are doing. Right now they're rapidly melting, pretty much everywhere they exist. This is not entirely from greenhouse heating. Black soot from fires (largely ours) also lands on glaciers and cause them to absorb more heat from the sun. But it's happening, nearly everywhere, rapidly.
Now, the thing about the Greenland glaciers is they can take ice cores and fairly accurately date the ice. And the current glaciers are far older than the Vikings. It's not plausible that Greenland had no ice just a few centuries back and then suddenly the glaciers formed, because those glaciers are known to be many thousands of years old.
And, like glaciers just about everywhere, they're melting now with surprising rapidity.