Why can't a bunch of white hats get together in some country with lax or missing Internet laws and make a virus that SLOWLY propagates throughout the Internet looking for VERY OLD vulnerabilities, infect those machines, download the patches and turn on auto-update, maybe scan the local network and then outside for a week or so, then alert the owner with a polite pop-up and background change telling them they've been infected by at least one virus and should get some AV and some patches and maybe even list some sources.
Dick move? Yes. Illegal in the US? Yes. Nightmare for admin-type-folks? Yes.
But if it's attacking vulns that are YEARS old it would only affect forgotten or luddite-owned boxes.
If it's slow, like a packet a second or slower, it wont clog any networks.
And it will prevent a lot of the stupid viruses that slam the net every now and then.
If they do they apparently never thought about what life would be like if they succeeded in creating anarchy.
Anarchy means no laws, so who ever exerts the most force or oppression over others wins. I want your land, so I murder you. You family doesn't like it? If I have more guns and henchmen, I murder them, too. Anarchy and pure freedom would last about 1 week before it evolved into despotism controlled by local warlords raping and murdering whomever they please. There would be no social, political or scientific progress ever again, unless perhaps one warlord gained enough power to become a dictator/monarch, and then we could start the middle ages all over again.
There's a guy in Maine on a sex offenders list for statutory rape. OF HIS WIFE.
The state pressed charges and used their child as "evidence" of the "crime" and now he has to register where ever he goes.
Some college buddies and I were joking around and saying half the shit we pulled on campus would now be considered a terrorist act. I thought about it later, and I seriously think that under todays laws as a teen I could have been charged as a terrorist (homemade fireworks and other experiments, but no bombs so maybe I'd be safe of charges. Well, there was the time I filled the little Jack Daniels bottle with black powder...) and a sex offended (as a HS senior my girlfriend was a sophomore). Maybe throw in computer criminal (I must have done SOMETHING illegal) and FCC violator while you're at it for the unlicensed transmitter I made with a radio shack kit that apparently is no longer for sale.
ANYWAY, if any of that was online that would make a hell of a fun second-date conversation, assuming I ever had one for the rest of my life. Oh shit, now it is! Damnit!
Why are old people so complacent about brain-dead, arbitrary rules, needless delays and shaky or false information? Why do they tolerate it instead of demanding change or fixing it themselves? Why do they say "ho-hum" and become part of the problem instead of finding a solution? Why is tradition - the mindless repetition of the past - such a valued quality?
Quick case in point that comes to mind due to a email I recently received: Fox News lied and "reported" that Obama is a Muslim who went to a terrorist training camp and repeated this dozens of times for a 24-hour news cycle, at 5AM they retracted it once and then lied and said Clinton was the source of that first lie, and then their favorite pundit called Edwards a "faggot" and they are STILL the most popular "news" network. Oh, and they didn't understand why the Dems didn't want to go to their debate.
Ha. You should see their computer version of Axis and Allies. I counted 17 bugs in the first hour of play. And not minor details. Drastic bugs, game-changing bugs, some resulting in complete crashes. I wrote a review and then found 11 more bugs.
They obviously do not care about their customers, as even the most minor concern and testing would reveal these problems and they would fix them before release.
"Using his method for populations in 2000, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Utah and Mississippi would each gain one seat; Texas, New York, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina would lose one; and California would lose three. "That could very well freak people out," says Edelman."
So, basically "red" states would gain seats and "blue" states would lose them?
I never realized that electoral votes are different than the number of representatives. With a minimum of 3 per state, some states have 1 vote per 200k +/- while populous states have 1 vote per 600k+/-. THAT is a system I'd like to see overhauled. Give each state one electoral vote per seat, or abolish it all together.
Even better, abolish the "one man, one vote" system. That's great as long as there are 2 parties, but to actually get accurate results you either need N-1 "approval" votes per N choices, or have the voters rank their choices and do instant runoffs until someone wins Otherwise you can have a situation in which 79% of the people like 4 candidates and hate 1, and then split their votes among those 4 and the one they hate withs with 21% of the vote.
These wiretaps are so important we must throw away the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and all privacy laws and then pass legislation making it retroactively legal to do all that and protect the phone companies from law suits and specifically protect Bush from felony prosecution!
This story is obviously all lies. The government would never lie about national security just to protect a president with a 20% approval record and to make the opposition party look week.
As long as you're doing nothing wrong you don't need privacy. [What the government considers wrong subject to change without notice nor Constitutional restriction. Civil rights void where journalist are prohibited. Contents may settle during extraordinary rendition.]
Actually, that has been eliminated as a cause in countless studies, yet I just read another wire report today where the English major journalist speculated just that.
I keep seeing pseudo-scientific authors make the same argument that "there are X universal constants/laws and if any one of them were changed life could not exist, and the odds of that are [some astronomical number] to 1, thus that proves God/Intelligent Design/Xenu/etc."
First fallacy: the idea that the only kind of life that could exist in ANY universe is life AS WE KNOW IT is extremely arrogant and non-scientific. I get irked just by the people who believe only another Earth could support life in this universe...
Second fallacy: if the conditions did not set the stage for life, there would be no lifeforms to sit around and wonder about the scientific constants/laws that set the stage for life. It's a conditional probability: 100% of constants/laws that allow lifeforms to sit around and think about the universe will support life. You might as well roll a bunch of dice, remove every die that didn't come up a 1, and "See? They're all ones! God exists!"
I think 1600, but the one time I used that setting it was very noisy and I couldn't adjust the photos. Of course, if the stars are properly exposed I wouldn't need to adjust it...
I will play with the lens I have and hopefully the telescope and see how into it I am. I kinda want the telescope...
I took some nice shots of the moon with a 200mm (x1.6) on my Digital Rebel XTi, but not as nice as yours. I haven't intentionally tried to take pictures of stars, but I got some in the background of 8"-13" city shots. I'm guessing I don't need a really long exposure to take star photos, and maybe if I make it to NH at Christmas I'll try some Milkyway shots. I guess I haven't thought about taking pictures of stars with a lens because I'm chomping at the bit to try my parents new 10" telescope -- computerized, auto level, GPS, compass... *drool*
How much were your big lenses? I did see one on amazon for $300 but wasn't sure of it's quality.
"This set is limited to photos taken with an unaided camera - no telescopes, though I do use 500mm and 600mm lenses sometimes which provide significant magnification."
Unless you're taking a woman's portrait while she undresses in another apartment building, 600mm is no portrait lens;)
When they told me, across the USA, in a voice mail, that I could not have admin privs I replied "I guess the only way I can do my work is to format the box and borrow an OS and start over. Let me know if that's incorrect" knowing that it takes them hours to set up a laptop AND I would be breaking license rules. I figured the admin would cave in finally and let me work. Instead, he just whined back in a voice mail about how he would rather I not do that.
Well, it turned out that the work I was sent over to do was already done, and they wanted me to do something completely different, and I never even needed the laptop.
I was also an admin once. I had a psycho user who would scream and yell and sputter and lose it over minor issues. He completely freaked out because his docs were "gone." I did a search, and there they were in "My Documents." I looked around some more, and he had the usual "My Documents" folder in the usual place, and another folder on the desktop also called "My Documents" and also on the desktop he had a shortcut to a "D:\My Documents." How he had done this I wasn't sure, but it was all my fault.
Then we had the guy who complained of a slow computer. He had about 30 icons on his taskbar, about 8 of them screen saver programs and who knows what else. I suggested deleting all of them and he balked. I suggested deleting one or more and he balked. Then I started to leave and he asked me if I was going to do anything or not.
But my FAVORITE story: my ex's dad called completely irate. He wanted us to drive 200 miles to his house on a work night and fix his computer. His daughter was crying, his wife locked herself in the bedroom, and he was in a rage because they did something and now he couldn't print AND his landline didn't work. (Needless to say, I had fixed this computer numerous times only to find 400 pieces of spyware and 15 screensavers and 86 viruses on my next visit) Well, my ex explained that we didn't want to do 8 hours of driving that night so he should call the phone company to fix his landline and we'd see about his computer on the weekend.
2 days later, a guy from AT&T shows up, unplugs the printer's USB cable from the phone jack and leaves.
"I is an engineer!" admins Sysadmins and wire runners who think one becomes an engineer simply by changing his title to "engineer." This makes for great fun when Systems Engineers (systems integration, production, platform, environmental testing, component, etc. engineers, usually mechanical but also electrical) look for Sys Eng jobs and the search engine keeps returning Sysadmin jobs that were mislabeled by morons who wanted a better title without the schooling. And no, getting an MSCE does not make you an engineer.
I-never-heard-of-that-problem-so-it's-impossible admins We had network tools and browsers that would lock up for minutes at a time, all the time. I reported it again and again and was told it was impossible. I guess I was hallucinating for 300 seconds at a time repeatedly throughout a the day. Months later I mentioned it to an underling and within 2 minutes he changed DNS settings and everything worked perfectly. To the same admin, I asked him to either stop forcing my desktop to sync with their server's clock, or to set their clock to be at least 15 minutes withing the actual time, preferably withing one or two minutes. I was told that it was impossible to sync desktop clocks to remote computers and I was confused. I volunteered to demonstrate it by changing my clock and then waiting a few minutes for it to be changed back to the wrong time, but he was not interested, because it was impossible. That was 5 years ago and the clocks are still off, but only by 4 or so minutes now, not the 17 or 23 or whatever annoying number it was. I also asked why 50% of my hard drive was "reserved" and was told it was impossible, or I didn't know what virtual memory was (40GB of swap?). I caught him once and showed him, and he shrugged and wandered off.
Slaves-to-super-secret-policy admins Briefly I moved in to (and later back out of) another building in the same company with different admins who had to follow corporate policy. That policy forced us, a computer security company, to use IE. An obsolete version of IE. And we were not allowed to install or change anything, no matter how minor. Our homepage was locked to a link that had been broken for over a year and we couldn't even hit "stop" - we had to let it time out before we could use the browser. I once requested a laptop for a 2 week business trip. I told them I needed admin privs so I could install a compiler. They said ok, gave me the laptop, and I was on my way. Once I landed on the other side of the country I tried to install the compiler and found I had no privileges. I called and asked wtf, and they told me they don't give admin privs. They had no explanation as to why they waited until I carried that boat anchor cross country before telling me.
I thought about this some more. People rant that welfare moms are having 15 babies and successful people 1, or less. But I'm not sure which is really a sign of better genes: the one who survived tough odds, or the one who succeeded but may have been born into that success.
But, that's not really my point. Were it not for modern society, Stephen Hawking would not have survived to do much of his work. I'm not sure he actually reproduced, but maybe "evolution" for us has moved on from an *individual's* survival of the fittest (or more aptly, non-survival of the least fit) to a state of our whole civilization.
One man's vigilante is another's terrorist. The KKK thinks of themselves as vigilantes protecting white America, and the Black Panthers protecting blacks, a Timothy McVeigh protected us from the government or something, and the Unabomber protected us from technology, and I'm sure Al Queda thinks they are righting wrongs committed by the West.
But will this dude be prosecuted as a terrorist or hate criminal? What if he were black and Muslim? No difference? Are you sure?
Someone asks a question about survival, people reply with answers that will actually kill you in a survival situation, and the thread gets locked as "resolved."
Ok, so maybe we are mutating faster, or there are more of us around so there are more mutations, etc. But as I understand: evolution = random mutation + non-random selection. Right now it seems there is no selection at all. Even the impotent and infertile can reproduce now. Unless one gets killed before they become a teen they'll most likely reproduce.
Everyone write their local news station and tell them the RIAA has just declared it is illegal to listen to any music you own on an iPod. That is stupid and fluffy and shocking enough to be make it on TV between a car crash and a basket full of new puppies.
Every time I look for an answer there I find one of two things: 1) Someone asked my question, someone else didn't understand the question and answered a different question, and the thread was locked. 2) I find a related question to which I know the answer in depth, someone else didn't understand the questions and answered a different question, and the thread was locked.
or were forced to pick one standard like in the rest of the world, you wouldn't need 5+ masts in one place, each with it's own backup, all to support all the different proprietary standards.
Where's that invisible hand of the free market that is supposed to magically make our disjointed, antiquated mobile system more efficient than the rest of the world's?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and it would probably kill most/all of the bot nets.
Why can't a bunch of white hats get together in some country with lax or missing Internet laws and make a virus that SLOWLY propagates throughout the Internet looking for VERY OLD vulnerabilities, infect those machines, download the patches and turn on auto-update, maybe scan the local network and then outside for a week or so, then alert the owner with a polite pop-up and background change telling them they've been infected by at least one virus and should get some AV and some patches and maybe even list some sources.
Dick move? Yes. Illegal in the US? Yes. Nightmare for admin-type-folks? Yes.
But if it's attacking vulns that are YEARS old it would only affect forgotten or luddite-owned boxes.
If it's slow, like a packet a second or slower, it wont clog any networks.
And it will prevent a lot of the stupid viruses that slam the net every now and then.
If they do they apparently never thought about what life would be like if they succeeded in creating anarchy.
Anarchy means no laws, so who ever exerts the most force or oppression over others wins. I want your land, so I murder you. You family doesn't like it? If I have more guns and henchmen, I murder them, too. Anarchy and pure freedom would last about 1 week before it evolved into despotism controlled by local warlords raping and murdering whomever they please. There would be no social, political or scientific progress ever again, unless perhaps one warlord gained enough power to become a dictator/monarch, and then we could start the middle ages all over again.
There's a guy in Maine on a sex offenders list for statutory rape. OF HIS WIFE.
The state pressed charges and used their child as "evidence" of the "crime" and now he has to register where ever he goes.
Some college buddies and I were joking around and saying half the shit we pulled on campus would now be considered a terrorist act. I thought about it later, and I seriously think that under todays laws as a teen I could have been charged as a terrorist (homemade fireworks and other experiments, but no bombs so maybe I'd be safe of charges. Well, there was the time I filled the little Jack Daniels bottle with black powder...) and a sex offended (as a HS senior my girlfriend was a sophomore). Maybe throw in computer criminal (I must have done SOMETHING illegal) and FCC violator while you're at it for the unlicensed transmitter I made with a radio shack kit that apparently is no longer for sale.
ANYWAY, if any of that was online that would make a hell of a fun second-date conversation, assuming I ever had one for the rest of my life. Oh shit, now it is! Damnit!
Why are old people so complacent about brain-dead, arbitrary rules, needless delays and shaky or false information? Why do they tolerate it instead of demanding change or fixing it themselves? Why do they say "ho-hum" and become part of the problem instead of finding a solution? Why is tradition - the mindless repetition of the past - such a valued quality?
Quick case in point that comes to mind due to a email I recently received: Fox News lied and "reported" that Obama is a Muslim who went to a terrorist training camp and repeated this dozens of times for a 24-hour news cycle, at 5AM they retracted it once and then lied and said Clinton was the source of that first lie, and then their favorite pundit called Edwards a "faggot" and they are STILL the most popular "news" network. Oh, and they didn't understand why the Dems didn't want to go to their debate.
Ha. You should see their computer version of Axis and Allies. I counted 17 bugs in the first hour of play. And not minor details. Drastic bugs, game-changing bugs, some resulting in complete crashes. I wrote a review and then found 11 more bugs.
They obviously do not care about their customers, as even the most minor concern and testing would reveal these problems and they would fix them before release.
http://www.epinions.com/game-review-1A33-207E645C-3A2C5887-prod2
Call me when they put a miniature Sterling engine on a chip and use it to recharge the battery.
"Using his method for populations in 2000, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Utah and Mississippi would each gain one seat; Texas, New York, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina would lose one; and California would lose three. "That could very well freak people out," says Edelman."
So, basically "red" states would gain seats and "blue" states would lose them?
At a quick glance, though, it does seem he has a point: Montanta has almost a million citizens per seat, while most states are around 700k.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population
I never realized that electoral votes are different than the number of representatives. With a minimum of 3 per state, some states have 1 vote per 200k +/- while populous states have 1 vote per 600k+/-. THAT is a system I'd like to see overhauled. Give each state one electoral vote per seat, or abolish it all together.
Even better, abolish the "one man, one vote" system. That's great as long as there are 2 parties, but to actually get accurate results you either need N-1 "approval" votes per N choices, or have the voters rank their choices and do instant runoffs until someone wins Otherwise you can have a situation in which 79% of the people like 4 candidates and hate 1, and then split their votes among those 4 and the one they hate withs with 21% of the vote.
These wiretaps are so important we must throw away the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and all privacy laws and then pass legislation making it retroactively legal to do all that and protect the phone companies from law suits and specifically protect Bush from felony prosecution!
This story is obviously all lies. The government would never lie about national security just to protect a president with a 20% approval record and to make the opposition party look week.
As long as you're doing nothing wrong you don't need privacy.
[What the government considers wrong subject to change without notice nor Constitutional restriction. Civil rights void where journalist are prohibited. Contents may settle during extraordinary rendition.]
Actually, that has been eliminated as a cause in countless studies, yet I just read another wire report today where the English major journalist speculated just that.
I keep seeing pseudo-scientific authors make the same argument that "there are X universal constants/laws and if any one of them were changed life could not exist, and the odds of that are [some astronomical number] to 1, thus that proves God/Intelligent Design/Xenu/etc."
First fallacy: the idea that the only kind of life that could exist in ANY universe is life AS WE KNOW IT is extremely arrogant and non-scientific. I get irked just by the people who believe only another Earth could support life in this universe...
Second fallacy: if the conditions did not set the stage for life, there would be no lifeforms to sit around and wonder about the scientific constants/laws that set the stage for life. It's a conditional probability: 100% of constants/laws that allow lifeforms to sit around and think about the universe will support life. You might as well roll a bunch of dice, remove every die that didn't come up a 1, and "See? They're all ones! God exists!"
Real men think in parallel.
I think 1600, but the one time I used that setting it was very noisy and I couldn't adjust the photos. Of course, if the stars are properly exposed I wouldn't need to adjust it...
I will play with the lens I have and hopefully the telescope and see how into it I am. I kinda want the telescope...
Thanks for the links
I took some nice shots of the moon with a 200mm (x1.6) on my Digital Rebel XTi, but not as nice as yours. I haven't intentionally tried to take pictures of stars, but I got some in the background of 8"-13" city shots. I'm guessing I don't need a really long exposure to take star photos, and maybe if I make it to NH at Christmas I'll try some Milkyway shots. I guess I haven't thought about taking pictures of stars with a lens because I'm chomping at the bit to try my parents new 10" telescope -- computerized, auto level, GPS, compass... *drool*
How much were your big lenses? I did see one on amazon for $300 but wasn't sure of it's quality.
"This set is limited to photos taken with an unaided camera - no telescopes, though I do use 500mm and 600mm lenses sometimes which provide significant magnification."
;)
Unless you're taking a woman's portrait while she undresses in another apartment building, 600mm is no portrait lens
http://www.amazon.com/Canon-600mm-Super-Telephoto-Cameras/dp/B00009R6X9/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1197496457&sr=8-2
When they told me, across the USA, in a voice mail, that I could not have admin privs I replied "I guess the only way I can do my work is to format the box and borrow an OS and start over. Let me know if that's incorrect" knowing that it takes them hours to set up a laptop AND I would be breaking license rules. I figured the admin would cave in finally and let me work. Instead, he just whined back in a voice mail about how he would rather I not do that.
Well, it turned out that the work I was sent over to do was already done, and they wanted me to do something completely different, and I never even needed the laptop.
I was also an admin once. I had a psycho user who would scream and yell and sputter and lose it over minor issues. He completely freaked out because his docs were "gone." I did a search, and there they were in "My Documents." I looked around some more, and he had the usual "My Documents" folder in the usual place, and another folder on the desktop also called "My Documents" and also on the desktop he had a shortcut to a "D:\My Documents." How he had done this I wasn't sure, but it was all my fault.
Then we had the guy who complained of a slow computer. He had about 30 icons on his taskbar, about 8 of them screen saver programs and who knows what else. I suggested deleting all of them and he balked. I suggested deleting one or more and he balked. Then I started to leave and he asked me if I was going to do anything or not.
But my FAVORITE story: my ex's dad called completely irate. He wanted us to drive 200 miles to his house on a work night and fix his computer. His daughter was crying, his wife locked herself in the bedroom, and he was in a rage because they did something and now he couldn't print AND his landline didn't work. (Needless to say, I had fixed this computer numerous times only to find 400 pieces of spyware and 15 screensavers and 86 viruses on my next visit) Well, my ex explained that we didn't want to do 8 hours of driving that night so he should call the phone company to fix his landline and we'd see about his computer on the weekend.
2 days later, a guy from AT&T shows up, unplugs the printer's USB cable from the phone jack and leaves.
"I is an engineer!" admins
Sysadmins and wire runners who think one becomes an engineer simply by changing his title to "engineer." This makes for great fun when Systems Engineers (systems integration, production, platform, environmental testing, component, etc. engineers, usually mechanical but also electrical) look for Sys Eng jobs and the search engine keeps returning Sysadmin jobs that were mislabeled by morons who wanted a better title without the schooling. And no, getting an MSCE does not make you an engineer.
I-never-heard-of-that-problem-so-it's-impossible admins
We had network tools and browsers that would lock up for minutes at a time, all the time. I reported it again and again and was told it was impossible. I guess I was hallucinating for 300 seconds at a time repeatedly throughout a the day. Months later I mentioned it to an underling and within 2 minutes he changed DNS settings and everything worked perfectly. To the same admin, I asked him to either stop forcing my desktop to sync with their server's clock, or to set their clock to be at least 15 minutes withing the actual time, preferably withing one or two minutes. I was told that it was impossible to sync desktop clocks to remote computers and I was confused. I volunteered to demonstrate it by changing my clock and then waiting a few minutes for it to be changed back to the wrong time, but he was not interested, because it was impossible. That was 5 years ago and the clocks are still off, but only by 4 or so minutes now, not the 17 or 23 or whatever annoying number it was. I also asked why 50% of my hard drive was "reserved" and was told it was impossible, or I didn't know what virtual memory was (40GB of swap?). I caught him once and showed him, and he shrugged and wandered off.
Slaves-to-super-secret-policy admins
Briefly I moved in to (and later back out of) another building in the same company with different admins who had to follow corporate policy. That policy forced us, a computer security company, to use IE. An obsolete version of IE. And we were not allowed to install or change anything, no matter how minor. Our homepage was locked to a link that had been broken for over a year and we couldn't even hit "stop" - we had to let it time out before we could use the browser. I once requested a laptop for a 2 week business trip. I told them I needed admin privs so I could install a compiler. They said ok, gave me the laptop, and I was on my way. Once I landed on the other side of the country I tried to install the compiler and found I had no privileges. I called and asked wtf, and they told me they don't give admin privs. They had no explanation as to why they waited until I carried that boat anchor cross country before telling me.
I thought about this some more. People rant that welfare moms are having 15 babies and successful people 1, or less. But I'm not sure which is really a sign of better genes: the one who survived tough odds, or the one who succeeded but may have been born into that success.
But, that's not really my point. Were it not for modern society, Stephen Hawking would not have survived to do much of his work. I'm not sure he actually reproduced, but maybe "evolution" for us has moved on from an *individual's* survival of the fittest (or more aptly, non-survival of the least fit) to a state of our whole civilization.
One man's vigilante is another's terrorist. The KKK thinks of themselves as vigilantes protecting white America, and the Black Panthers protecting blacks, a Timothy McVeigh protected us from the government or something, and the Unabomber protected us from technology, and I'm sure Al Queda thinks they are righting wrongs committed by the West.
But will this dude be prosecuted as a terrorist or hate criminal? What if he were black and Muslim? No difference? Are you sure?
Someone asks a question about survival, people reply with answers that will actually kill you in a survival situation, and the thread gets locked as "resolved."
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070602064524AAEctAk
Ok, so maybe we are mutating faster, or there are more of us around so there are more mutations, etc. But as I understand: evolution = random mutation + non-random selection. Right now it seems there is no selection at all. Even the impotent and infertile can reproduce now. Unless one gets killed before they become a teen they'll most likely reproduce.
Everyone write their local news station and tell them the RIAA has just declared it is illegal to listen to any music you own on an iPod. That is stupid and fluffy and shocking enough to be make it on TV between a car crash and a basket full of new puppies.
Every time I look for an answer there I find one of two things:
1) Someone asked my question, someone else didn't understand the question and answered a different question, and the thread was locked.
2) I find a related question to which I know the answer in depth, someone else didn't understand the questions and answered a different question, and the thread was locked.
Fucking worthless.
or were forced to pick one standard like in the rest of the world, you wouldn't need 5+ masts in one place, each with it's own backup, all to support all the different proprietary standards.
Where's that invisible hand of the free market that is supposed to magically make our disjointed, antiquated mobile system more efficient than the rest of the world's?
Mod me down for being a commie bastard.