And guess what encourages this antipattern? jQuery. And guess what virtually every website on the Internet uses these days for virtually everything? jQuery.
Not that I'm saying jQuery isn't a godsend, it is, but you really wish the thing had been designed in a way that doesn't encourage closures for everything.
If Sprint dies, it doesn't get to choose who buys its assets. You can expect Verizon and AT&T, as two companies with the largest pockets, to take over most of the assets, or drive up the price so high that even if T-Mobile ends up getting more resources it'll pay over the odds for them.
Sprint is dying right now. Might as well make sure the other minor national operator benefits from it.
What exactly do you think the local operation does? Maintain a parallel Facebook with its own independent privacy policies and implementation of those policies?
All of the questions MPs want answered pertain to decisions being made by Zuckerberg and his US-based subordinates. They don't give a fuck how much advertising "Facebook UK" was able to sell.
Scenario 1: Two minor league operators merge to form on major league operator, increasing the number of major league operators by one.
Scenario 2, the likely alternative: One minor league operator goes bankrupt. The three remaining operators, one minor, two major, pick over the remains. The FCC might help out the minor operator on the grounds the other two are already large, but, you know, Idjit Pai is in charge, so that won't happen, and most of the bankrupt assets end up in the hands of the two richest operators.
So my answer is no, because what's being proposed is scenario one. Scenario 2 is very scary. Realistically it'll leave us with only two operators, because I doubt T-Mobile can hold its own if up against Verizon and AT&T with no additional resources.
I'm not sure what country you come from, but when I was brought up in Britain, parents didn't have to buy anything like that for their children. That would be considered a regressive tax that would effectively prevent poorer children from getting the same level of education as their richer classmates.
I now live in the US, where there's a semi-voluntary thing going on where parents are encouraged to donate school supplies. I find that bad enough.
I pay taxes. My children will, if educated properly, pay more taxes in future than if they're not educated properly. The ability of someone to become a contributor to society should not depend upon the wealth of their parents, and children shouldn't be punished, deprived of a future, due to their parent's financial situation. Society, as expressed through our government, should pay for education.
The exact same company? Obama used Cambridge Analytica?
(Also this is a fairly reasonable analysis of the whole whataboutism thing that implies Obama's use of Facebook data willingly given up by participants knowing it would be used by the Obama campaign is in some way the exact same thing as CA's use of "surveys" which were apparently unconnected to politics to get people to give up their private data.
In the case of Cambridge Analytica, information was gathered from users and given to a third party under false pretenses. According to Facebook, University of Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz which users could download in an app called âoethisisyourdigitallife.â Kogan presented the app as a tool that would be used for academic research â" but the work was paid for by Cambridge Analytica. Facebook users were not informed that their data (and that of their friends) would be deployed by a political firm hired by the Trump campaign for psychographic profiling in the upcoming election.
You completely didn't understand his post. CDMA won the war completely, so utterly surpassing GSM that GSM switched to CDMA. If you have a so-called GSM phone right now, it uses CDMA technology.
CDMA hasn't won anything, either the standard or the air interface technology. The standard lost against GSM. Period. Qualcomm has quit development and has told partners to switch to version four of GSM.
If you meant air interface technologies, and meant to write "CDMA won against TDMA" (GSM isn't an air interface technology), then even that's dubious. GSM did switch to a code division based air interface technology for version three, but that's widely considered a disaster, which is why most carriers started implementing LTE, which isn't code division based, long before it was ready. Long term, I see 2G GSM and 4G GSM (LTE) surviving, and 3G GSM being phased out. It's power hungry, spectrum hungry, and too vulnerable to congestion.
Yes, but the argument that an analog reproduction of a 96khz source is more faithful than a 44khz CD is not incorrect.
Yes it is. There's an assumption by many analog advocates that analog means infinite resolution. It doesn't. If it did, we would still be using dial up modems over analog switched long distance lines as we could send terrabytes of data every second just by choosing an encoding system with a really high baudrate.
Vinyl records have a frequency range in which they can reproduce audio fairly well, but limitations of needles, the amount of noise added by the turntable, and the pressing process puts finite limits on what a record can store. Yes, a very high combination of record, needle, and turntable, and associated electronics can possibly beat a 44khz CD player (but you can get digital systems better than that), but that's not a typical set up. Typically, using a regularly pressed record, and conventional equipment, the record will be roughly the same frequency range, but distorted by more artifacts.
He sent emails to county jail employees, luring them on the "ewashtenavv.org" domain, a carbon copy of the county's official website of "ewashtenaw.org."
The difference between the domain names is that the latter ends in double-ewe dot org, the former in two vees dot org.
(Minor correction: I wrote IS-136 above from memory as the official TIA name for cdma2000. I think it's actually IS-2000. Sorry about that. Rest of rant is correct.)
GSM is a family of standards. The term CDMA either refers to a rival family of standards, developed by Qualcomm, or a air interface method. If your sentence is to make any sense, then you're saying Qualcomm's standards beat GSM. They didn't. Qualcomm discontinued further development of IS-95/IS-136 (cdmaOne/cdma2000), and is encouraging its partners to switch to the fourth generation of GSM, LTE.
Fourth generation GSM uses an OFDMA air interface system.
Every GSM phone includes a wideband CDMA radio for 3G service.
Technically correct, but you're no longer referring to CDMA the family of standards, you're referring to an air interface method. GSM v3 (UMTS) supports CDMA-the-air-interface-method.
Almost all GSM phones, with the exception of a handful designed to work on Sprint or Verizon's network, do not have chipsets capable of supporting IS-95/IS-2000.
The only parts of GSM which still follow the original GSM spec are voice and the SIM card
If by this you mean there is now a fourth version of GSM, which is more advanced than the first version of GSM, then this is true, but what does that have to do with anything at all? GSM is a full stack that's under it's third revision (v4, because they started at 2.) You would expect each successive version to include many features from previous standards, drop some, and add new features.
GSM is still being developed. Qualcomm has completely discontinued further development of CDMA.
You see, GSM was originally based on TDMA
You should probably clarify that GSM originally exclusively used an air interface method called TDMA. There's also a set of standards called TDMA which are unrelated.
This worked fine for low-bandwidth communications like voice, but was horribly inefficient when cellular data service began to become important
OK, let's stop this now, because you are one very confused person.
GSM now supports a set of air interface methods, including TDMA, CDMA, and OFDMA. TDMA provides extremely reliable voice and fixed-low-bandwidth data, as you point out. CDMA is somewhat better at high bandwidth data (though TDMA's limits were never tested), but was not picked for 3G because of any technical reason: Qualcomm lobbied politicians across the globe and pretty much made it politically impossible for ETSI to include a non-CDMA air interface in 3G GSM (UMTS.)
Unfortunately, this was a disaster. Yes, I said it. It turns out CDMA is actually very shitty. It's power hungry, and to provide the high bandwidth applications UMTS was envisaged to support, UMTS's implementation required 5MHz spectrum blocks, which were difficult to overlay or combine with 2G GSM.
Now, you're about to argue with me about that, but here's the thing, and the bottom line:
Even Qualcomm knew CDMA-the-air-interface was shitty and were planning to phase it out from the mid 2000s.
CDMA is so unbelievably shitty, that not only did ETSI members rebel against UMTS pretty much as soon as UMTS was released, but even at the time users of Qualcomm's standards were also at the end of their tethers. Both ETSI and Qualcomm independently came to the conclusion that it didn't scale properly, it was power hungry, and it didn't work well with variable bandwidth applications like data. Every "improvement" you've seen to UMTS and IS-2000 since has been a hack to try to cover up CDMA's flaws.
ETSI started work almost straight away on OFDMA based 4G GSM, known as LTE. And they pretty much rushed LTE into production. Almost all carriers started deploying it despite the fact they hadn't even standardized how to make phone calls on it. From their point of view, this was an emergency. UMTS's flaws were so bad that even if more efficient variants such
As soon as some local or State court rules against some ISP on local/State "NN" laws or regs, the first Federal court they appeal it to will dismiss it rule the laws/regs in question as not within State or local powers.
OK, and?
Why the fuck is it that every time some politicians say they're going to do something to help X, people immediately come out of the woodwork to act as if they're going to pass laws to ban "Not X".
There's plenty of things politicians can do to help network neutrality, from not doing business with companies that don't practice it, to encouraging competitors and making it difficult for incumbents if the incumbents have anti-NN policies.
But to answer the point about the two things he "won": ultimately he won the primary and the general election because it's easy to win when you don't follow the rules. Trump doesn't follow the rules. Those who follow the rules aren't brazenly bigoted and divisive in an election, scapegoating everyone from undocumented Mexican immigrants to Muslims, nor do you promote violence, they know it's an easy win but it destroys the country in the long term. Trump did anyway.
You don't accept help from foreign powers. Trump did anyway.
You don't encourage people to commit crimes against your opponent and take advantage of the results. Trump did anyway.
Combined with a milquetoast press that hated Trump's rival even though it knew she was more qualified, and was more than happy to repeat the most batshit insane conspiracy theories about her from the well oiled right wing machine that's been churning these things out since the early 1990s, and with Comey's refusal to the two candidates equally, and Trump had a hidden advantage. And even then, he only won because our elections are broken, and consider trees more important than people.
Otherwise, he's been mostly losing. The election candidates he's backed have consistently failed. His attempts to turn bigotry into policy have been overturned and obstructed by everyone from judges to five star generals. He can't keep hold of any of this staff. The Republicans in Congress have pretty much ignored him when passing legislation.
By any reasonable metric, he's a failure. He can only "succeed" when he does by breaking the rules. Just as his property empire is built upon unpaid contracts and convenient bankruptcies.
Hitler rose to power saying he'd imprison socialists and union leaders. He ran on a platform of scapegoating Jews, which he claimed was behind both movements. Just what the fuck are you talking about?
Thanks for that. You just proved every single word of my comment correct while claiming the opposite, with your ludicrous assertions about Feminists and your unsubstantiated assertions that right wing jackasses aren't claiming Muslims are generally rapists when I can see with my own eyes that you fuckers are always making that claim. A great combination of obvious lying, mixed with "Wah wah Feminists aren't always attacking Muslims and won't join in when we call them all rapists so they must be anti-women and pro-Islam" - which is what I was criticizing you shitheads for.
Go back and re-read what you said... and then ask yourself if it really was the best way to debunk my views on you and your ilk.
How the hell did they get themselves into a situation where they had spectrum but had to use it by a specific date? Nobody else seemed to have that problem.
CDMA can refer to a set of standards created by Qualcomm, or it can refer to the Code Division Multiple Access form of data modulation and transmission.
GSM is a set of standards. So in the above sentence, the only thing you can be claiming is "The Qualcomm standards won the war against GSM."
This is not true. The GSM family of standards continues to exist and be developed. Qualcomm has stopped developing more of its "CDMA" standards and has advised its partners to migrate to the fourth generation of GSM.
GSM used TDMA - each phone gets its own timeslice, and they take turns talking to the tower
That's the correct tense. "Used". 2G GSM used timeslicing. 3G GSM (UMTS) used, instead, Code Division Multiple Access, though not "CDMA" (ie not the Qualcomm family of standards.) 4G GSM (LTE) uses OFDMA. Both 2G GSM and 3G GSM is on life support. 3G GSM offers more features than 2G GSM, but is much less reliable (because, frankly, CDMA is shit, and the only reason it was adopted for 3G is because of Qualcomm's lobbying), and requires far more bandwidth to provide a minimum service (5MHz rather than 600kHz.)
So even if we pretend this is CDMA vs TDMA, not Qualcomm standards vs GSM, your assertion still is incorrect. CDMA has lost. It lost after TDMA, but it's not actually the "winner". Right now that's OFDMA.
I think that I've covered enough to ensure you understand the point. If you claim "CDMA beat GSM", and you're referring to Code Division Multiple Access, your sentence doesn't make sense. If you're saying the Qualcomm standards beat GSM, that's obviously false. And if you think Code Divison Multiple Access is what the word decided to use, well, that's not true either.
The Qualcomm standards were shit. The technology is awful. I'm glad to see the back of them.
This is Slashdot. If you say that while you happen to disagree with their religion, you don't think all Muslims are rapists, do not see any legitimacy in deporting them or restricting their rights, and feel that terrified people who are fleeing persecution and war should be let in to your country even if they belong to a religion you're not terribly impressed by, then it means you're a liberal muslim hippie muslim atheist muslim muslim lover.
But it might be nice to go from two major carriers to three major carriers.
AT&T and Verizon continue to charge substantially more than what T-Mobile and Sprint PCS do, while being more than happy to treat their customers appallingly. That tells me that neither T-Mobile or Sprint have any market power to speak of, and shouldn't be considered competitors to the big two.
Sprint is migrating to the LTE variant of GSM, so their cdmaOne/cdma2000 network is increasingly a legacy/gap filler rather than their primary means to providing service, and would eventually be turned off. So that would be happening anyway, albeit more slowly than will happen if T-Mo takes control.
That said, T-Mobile being in control is pretty much a foregone conclusion. T-Mobile is well run and is growing. Sprint PCS has been beleaguered for a longer period than Apple was. It's always been poorly run, with no sense of direction. They botched the NEXTEL merger, initially went for WiMAX instead of LTE, and recently their "iPhone only" thing showed a complete lack of understanding of the market.
T-Mo has its faults, but it's almost always (with the exception of the period starting a year or two before they tried to merge with AT&T until Legere's takeover) been an extremely well run company with a focus on respecting their customers, building their network on quality open standards. (I sound like a shill, but I honestly have a high level of respect for them that I just don't have for the others, and it's based upon personal experience. That period I mention that included the AT&T merger was a bitter experience, proof any company can go to pot.)
Religious channels are usually free to the cable company and are provided due to must-carry FCC rules (they're usually broadcast stations in your area.) Home Shopping and Infomercial channels pay to be part of your package, so they reduce the cost somewhat.
That doesn't, of course, change the fact you're spending $60-80 a month for, ultimately, only a small handful of channels. Which is ludicrous.
To some extent, yeah. But mobile phones have a lot of planned obsolescence built into them, from difficult to replace batteries (even if the phone allows you to do that, you need to know where to look and there's a lot of FUD about third party batteries that puts people off buying them), to internal storage limits that are ludicrously small.
I think a better reason for the slow down is that phones are actually declining in quality while increasing in price. If the phone aimed at your needs and wants doesn't have critical features like a headphone jack, and most reports suggest a worse battery life than the one you have, then aren't you going to want to hold on to the one you have for longer?
If mobile phone makers would learn to diversify their product range just a little, rather than closing Samsung who in turn is cloning Apple, then I'd expect an explosion in sales.
You can use it now. Honestly. I've been using the pre-release for over a month and have yet to come across a single real problem with it. Most reliable Ubuntu release I've tried in a long time. Just a shame the UI continues to go in the wrong direction (but I'm using Cinnamon anyway...)
On some social issues they lean left. On healthcare, they usually depict "Single Payer" (that's what the NHS would look like if Thatcher had reformed it) as "leftist" or "far left". On Welfare they're continually wringing their hands saying it has to be cut to save the deficit. On Social Security they bought into the fiction that it's somehow going to go bankrupt and the only thing that can happen now is for all Millennials and Generation Xers to expect to never receive a penny.
They're mostly right wing, but because the leaders of the Democratic Party think highly of their views, the Democratic Party usually ends up with most of the same policies, which means they end up supporting the Democratic Party by default. And because the Democratic Party is to the left of the Republican Party, they get portrayed as "liberals" with a "left wing bias".
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And guess what encourages this antipattern? jQuery. And guess what virtually every website on the Internet uses these days for virtually everything? jQuery.
Not that I'm saying jQuery isn't a godsend, it is, but you really wish the thing had been designed in a way that doesn't encourage closures for everything.
If Sprint dies, it doesn't get to choose who buys its assets. You can expect Verizon and AT&T, as two companies with the largest pockets, to take over most of the assets, or drive up the price so high that even if T-Mobile ends up getting more resources it'll pay over the odds for them.
Sprint is dying right now. Might as well make sure the other minor national operator benefits from it.
What exactly do you think the local operation does? Maintain a parallel Facebook with its own independent privacy policies and implementation of those policies?
All of the questions MPs want answered pertain to decisions being made by Zuckerberg and his US-based subordinates. They don't give a fuck how much advertising "Facebook UK" was able to sell.
Also what about locally signed certificates, using a corporate or Intranet CA, that's installed on all computers that might use those certs?
That was, at one point, considered a best practice, but I assume this'll break that.
Scenario 1: Two minor league operators merge to form on major league operator, increasing the number of major league operators by one.
Scenario 2, the likely alternative: One minor league operator goes bankrupt. The three remaining operators, one minor, two major, pick over the remains. The FCC might help out the minor operator on the grounds the other two are already large, but, you know, Idjit Pai is in charge, so that won't happen, and most of the bankrupt assets end up in the hands of the two richest operators.
So my answer is no, because what's being proposed is scenario one. Scenario 2 is very scary. Realistically it'll leave us with only two operators, because I doubt T-Mobile can hold its own if up against Verizon and AT&T with no additional resources.
I'm not sure what country you come from, but when I was brought up in Britain, parents didn't have to buy anything like that for their children. That would be considered a regressive tax that would effectively prevent poorer children from getting the same level of education as their richer classmates.
I now live in the US, where there's a semi-voluntary thing going on where parents are encouraged to donate school supplies. I find that bad enough.
I pay taxes. My children will, if educated properly, pay more taxes in future than if they're not educated properly. The ability of someone to become a contributor to society should not depend upon the wealth of their parents, and children shouldn't be punished, deprived of a future, due to their parent's financial situation. Society, as expressed through our government, should pay for education.
The exact same company? Obama used Cambridge Analytica?
(Also this is a fairly reasonable analysis of the whole whataboutism thing that implies Obama's use of Facebook data willingly given up by participants knowing it would be used by the Obama campaign is in some way the exact same thing as CA's use of "surveys" which were apparently unconnected to politics to get people to give up their private data.
So can we quit it with the false equivalences?
CDMA hasn't won anything, either the standard or the air interface technology. The standard lost against GSM. Period. Qualcomm has quit development and has told partners to switch to version four of GSM.
If you meant air interface technologies, and meant to write "CDMA won against TDMA" (GSM isn't an air interface technology), then even that's dubious. GSM did switch to a code division based air interface technology for version three, but that's widely considered a disaster, which is why most carriers started implementing LTE, which isn't code division based, long before it was ready. Long term, I see 2G GSM and 4G GSM (LTE) surviving, and 3G GSM being phased out. It's power hungry, spectrum hungry, and too vulnerable to congestion.
Yes it is. There's an assumption by many analog advocates that analog means infinite resolution. It doesn't. If it did, we would still be using dial up modems over analog switched long distance lines as we could send terrabytes of data every second just by choosing an encoding system with a really high baudrate.
Vinyl records have a frequency range in which they can reproduce audio fairly well, but limitations of needles, the amount of noise added by the turntable, and the pressing process puts finite limits on what a record can store. Yes, a very high combination of record, needle, and turntable, and associated electronics can possibly beat a 44khz CD player (but you can get digital systems better than that), but that's not a typical set up. Typically, using a regularly pressed record, and conventional equipment, the record will be roughly the same frequency range, but distorted by more artifacts.
The difference between the domain names is that the latter ends in double-ewe dot org, the former in two vees dot org.
(Minor correction: I wrote IS-136 above from memory as the official TIA name for cdma2000. I think it's actually IS-2000. Sorry about that. Rest of rant is correct.)
No, it didn't.
GSM is a family of standards. The term CDMA either refers to a rival family of standards, developed by Qualcomm, or a air interface method. If your sentence is to make any sense, then you're saying Qualcomm's standards beat GSM. They didn't. Qualcomm discontinued further development of IS-95/IS-136 (cdmaOne/cdma2000), and is encouraging its partners to switch to the fourth generation of GSM, LTE.
Fourth generation GSM uses an OFDMA air interface system.
Technically correct, but you're no longer referring to CDMA the family of standards, you're referring to an air interface method. GSM v3 (UMTS) supports CDMA-the-air-interface-method.
Almost all GSM phones, with the exception of a handful designed to work on Sprint or Verizon's network, do not have chipsets capable of supporting IS-95/IS-2000.
If by this you mean there is now a fourth version of GSM, which is more advanced than the first version of GSM, then this is true, but what does that have to do with anything at all? GSM is a full stack that's under it's third revision (v4, because they started at 2.) You would expect each successive version to include many features from previous standards, drop some, and add new features.
GSM is still being developed. Qualcomm has completely discontinued further development of CDMA.
You should probably clarify that GSM originally exclusively used an air interface method called TDMA. There's also a set of standards called TDMA which are unrelated.
OK, let's stop this now, because you are one very confused person.
GSM now supports a set of air interface methods, including TDMA, CDMA, and OFDMA. TDMA provides extremely reliable voice and fixed-low-bandwidth data, as you point out. CDMA is somewhat better at high bandwidth data (though TDMA's limits were never tested), but was not picked for 3G because of any technical reason: Qualcomm lobbied politicians across the globe and pretty much made it politically impossible for ETSI to include a non-CDMA air interface in 3G GSM (UMTS.)
Unfortunately, this was a disaster. Yes, I said it. It turns out CDMA is actually very shitty. It's power hungry, and to provide the high bandwidth applications UMTS was envisaged to support, UMTS's implementation required 5MHz spectrum blocks, which were difficult to overlay or combine with 2G GSM.
Now, you're about to argue with me about that, but here's the thing, and the bottom line:
Even Qualcomm knew CDMA-the-air-interface was shitty and were planning to phase it out from the mid 2000s.
CDMA is so unbelievably shitty, that not only did ETSI members rebel against UMTS pretty much as soon as UMTS was released, but even at the time users of Qualcomm's standards were also at the end of their tethers. Both ETSI and Qualcomm independently came to the conclusion that it didn't scale properly, it was power hungry, and it didn't work well with variable bandwidth applications like data. Every "improvement" you've seen to UMTS and IS-2000 since has been a hack to try to cover up CDMA's flaws.
ETSI started work almost straight away on OFDMA based 4G GSM, known as LTE. And they pretty much rushed LTE into production. Almost all carriers started deploying it despite the fact they hadn't even standardized how to make phone calls on it. From their point of view, this was an emergency. UMTS's flaws were so bad that even if more efficient variants such
OK, and?
Why the fuck is it that every time some politicians say they're going to do something to help X, people immediately come out of the woodwork to act as if they're going to pass laws to ban "Not X".
There's plenty of things politicians can do to help network neutrality, from not doing business with companies that don't practice it, to encouraging competitors and making it difficult for incumbents if the incumbents have anti-NN policies.
He also keeps losing.
But to answer the point about the two things he "won": ultimately he won the primary and the general election because it's easy to win when you don't follow the rules. Trump doesn't follow the rules. Those who follow the rules aren't brazenly bigoted and divisive in an election, scapegoating everyone from undocumented Mexican immigrants to Muslims, nor do you promote violence, they know it's an easy win but it destroys the country in the long term. Trump did anyway.
You don't accept help from foreign powers. Trump did anyway.
You don't encourage people to commit crimes against your opponent and take advantage of the results. Trump did anyway.
Combined with a milquetoast press that hated Trump's rival even though it knew she was more qualified, and was more than happy to repeat the most batshit insane conspiracy theories about her from the well oiled right wing machine that's been churning these things out since the early 1990s, and with Comey's refusal to the two candidates equally, and Trump had a hidden advantage. And even then, he only won because our elections are broken, and consider trees more important than people.
Otherwise, he's been mostly losing. The election candidates he's backed have consistently failed. His attempts to turn bigotry into policy have been overturned and obstructed by everyone from judges to five star generals. He can't keep hold of any of this staff. The Republicans in Congress have pretty much ignored him when passing legislation.
By any reasonable metric, he's a failure. He can only "succeed" when he does by breaking the rules. Just as his property empire is built upon unpaid contracts and convenient bankruptcies.
Hitler rose to power saying he'd imprison socialists and union leaders. He ran on a platform of scapegoating Jews, which he claimed was behind both movements. Just what the fuck are you talking about?
Thanks for that. You just proved every single word of my comment correct while claiming the opposite, with your ludicrous assertions about Feminists and your unsubstantiated assertions that right wing jackasses aren't claiming Muslims are generally rapists when I can see with my own eyes that you fuckers are always making that claim. A great combination of obvious lying, mixed with "Wah wah Feminists aren't always attacking Muslims and won't join in when we call them all rapists so they must be anti-women and pro-Islam" - which is what I was criticizing you shitheads for.
Go back and re-read what you said... and then ask yourself if it really was the best way to debunk my views on you and your ilk.
How the hell did they get themselves into a situation where they had spectrum but had to use it by a specific date? Nobody else seemed to have that problem.
CDMA can refer to a set of standards created by Qualcomm, or it can refer to the Code Division Multiple Access form of data modulation and transmission.
GSM is a set of standards. So in the above sentence, the only thing you can be claiming is "The Qualcomm standards won the war against GSM."
This is not true. The GSM family of standards continues to exist and be developed. Qualcomm has stopped developing more of its "CDMA" standards and has advised its partners to migrate to the fourth generation of GSM.
That's the correct tense. "Used". 2G GSM used timeslicing. 3G GSM (UMTS) used, instead, Code Division Multiple Access, though not "CDMA" (ie not the Qualcomm family of standards.) 4G GSM (LTE) uses OFDMA. Both 2G GSM and 3G GSM is on life support. 3G GSM offers more features than 2G GSM, but is much less reliable (because, frankly, CDMA is shit, and the only reason it was adopted for 3G is because of Qualcomm's lobbying), and requires far more bandwidth to provide a minimum service (5MHz rather than 600kHz.)
So even if we pretend this is CDMA vs TDMA, not Qualcomm standards vs GSM, your assertion still is incorrect. CDMA has lost. It lost after TDMA, but it's not actually the "winner". Right now that's OFDMA.
I think that I've covered enough to ensure you understand the point. If you claim "CDMA beat GSM", and you're referring to Code Division Multiple Access, your sentence doesn't make sense. If you're saying the Qualcomm standards beat GSM, that's obviously false. And if you think Code Divison Multiple Access is what the word decided to use, well, that's not true either.
The Qualcomm standards were shit. The technology is awful. I'm glad to see the back of them.
This is Slashdot. If you say that while you happen to disagree with their religion, you don't think all Muslims are rapists, do not see any legitimacy in deporting them or restricting their rights, and feel that terrified people who are fleeing persecution and war should be let in to your country even if they belong to a religion you're not terribly impressed by, then it means you're a liberal muslim hippie muslim atheist muslim muslim lover.
You should know that by now.
But it might be nice to go from two major carriers to three major carriers.
AT&T and Verizon continue to charge substantially more than what T-Mobile and Sprint PCS do, while being more than happy to treat their customers appallingly. That tells me that neither T-Mobile or Sprint have any market power to speak of, and shouldn't be considered competitors to the big two.
Sprint is migrating to the LTE variant of GSM, so their cdmaOne/cdma2000 network is increasingly a legacy/gap filler rather than their primary means to providing service, and would eventually be turned off. So that would be happening anyway, albeit more slowly than will happen if T-Mo takes control.
That said, T-Mobile being in control is pretty much a foregone conclusion. T-Mobile is well run and is growing. Sprint PCS has been beleaguered for a longer period than Apple was. It's always been poorly run, with no sense of direction. They botched the NEXTEL merger, initially went for WiMAX instead of LTE, and recently their "iPhone only" thing showed a complete lack of understanding of the market.
T-Mo has its faults, but it's almost always (with the exception of the period starting a year or two before they tried to merge with AT&T until Legere's takeover) been an extremely well run company with a focus on respecting their customers, building their network on quality open standards. (I sound like a shill, but I honestly have a high level of respect for them that I just don't have for the others, and it's based upon personal experience. That period I mention that included the AT&T merger was a bitter experience, proof any company can go to pot.)
Religious channels are usually free to the cable company and are provided due to must-carry FCC rules (they're usually broadcast stations in your area.) Home Shopping and Infomercial channels pay to be part of your package, so they reduce the cost somewhat.
That doesn't, of course, change the fact you're spending $60-80 a month for, ultimately, only a small handful of channels. Which is ludicrous.
To some extent, yeah. But mobile phones have a lot of planned obsolescence built into them, from difficult to replace batteries (even if the phone allows you to do that, you need to know where to look and there's a lot of FUD about third party batteries that puts people off buying them), to internal storage limits that are ludicrously small.
I think a better reason for the slow down is that phones are actually declining in quality while increasing in price. If the phone aimed at your needs and wants doesn't have critical features like a headphone jack, and most reports suggest a worse battery life than the one you have, then aren't you going to want to hold on to the one you have for longer?
If mobile phone makers would learn to diversify their product range just a little, rather than closing Samsung who in turn is cloning Apple, then I'd expect an explosion in sales.
You can use it now. Honestly. I've been using the pre-release for over a month and have yet to come across a single real problem with it. Most reliable Ubuntu release I've tried in a long time. Just a shame the UI continues to go in the wrong direction (but I'm using Cinnamon anyway...)
On some social issues they lean left. On healthcare, they usually depict "Single Payer" (that's what the NHS would look like if Thatcher had reformed it) as "leftist" or "far left". On Welfare they're continually wringing their hands saying it has to be cut to save the deficit. On Social Security they bought into the fiction that it's somehow going to go bankrupt and the only thing that can happen now is for all Millennials and Generation Xers to expect to never receive a penny.
They're mostly right wing, but because the leaders of the Democratic Party think highly of their views, the Democratic Party usually ends up with most of the same policies, which means they end up supporting the Democratic Party by default. And because the Democratic Party is to the left of the Republican Party, they get portrayed as "liberals" with a "left wing bias".
It's nuts.