I think I saw that movie. It ends when Jeff Goldbloom eventually is able to stop his mad colleague from conducting the dangerous human trials in a last scene lab fight. Unfortunately the whole lab and the research go up in a fire that results from the fight.
Seriously, why do you have to resort to ridiculous movie-plot science in an attempt to understand this? I doubt many grants are issued because of newspaper articles. It's more likely that either the researchers wanted some fame and sent out press releases, or some reporter caught wind of the research and came snooping around asking questions to naive scientists who aren't familiar with how the popular treats science.
Is it possible that human brains just have the gain set a bit higher than simply "random" on connecting temporal causal events? It might be more adventageous to notice connections between events that aren't connected (then dissmiss them) than it is to ignore events that are connected causally.
In other words, it might be better to be a little over paranoid and think that the random shuffle on an Ipod isn't random, that childhood vaccinations cause (insert disease here) than it is to miss the fact that when some people eat fruit A, they die (but not say everyone).
Putting it a bit differently, there's more cost to missing connecting certain dangerous events than there is to miss-identifying harmless events that later turn out to be non-connected.
Also, let's not forget that he needs to future-proof his solution for digital transmissions. While there's tons of NTSC equipment on the market, what does one use to broadcast in digital?
I'm no expert in TV broadcasting, but my guess is this would be most easily accomplished by some black box that converts the NTSC broadcast signal into a digital one. Sure you'd only get 480p at best, but remember this is a LOW POWER station. Just getting a digital signal out is probbably more than anyone expects.
Converting to an all digital editing, producing, etc is likely expensive (at least from what I heard a few years ago). So the tape storage system is only really one component of that.
Re:Am I just being overly simplistic...
on
IPv6 Essentials
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Example: 192.168.1.2.3
Or is the goal to try and push IPv6 simply because it's "better?"
As I understand it one of the main reasons IPV4 wasn't just extended in address space was because routing becomes too difficult with such a large address space, so you need to build routing into the protocol. There's also some very cool features of IPV6 like multi-casting that's been very poorly supported under IPV4. This would allow things like broadcasting internet based TV without multi-gigabyte connections. When the day comes that said ISP calls me up to tell me "Hey, we're changing over to IPv6 at the end of the month (or year, or whatever), so you need to be ready for it," THEN I will start worrying about how to implement it.
That'll probbably never happen (or at least not for 20 years maybe). IPV4 isn't going away, what'll happen (someday) is your ISP will one day support IPV6 and you'll be able to get an IPV6 IP address. No one is going to call you up, you'll probbably have to call them up and ask if they're supporting it. Until then, V4 and NAT are working perfectly well for me, thanks.
Well, I'm sure horse and buggy owners thought that horses were perfectly good transportation when the car first came out too. There weren't many paved roads, the things were expensive, and took special fuel to run them where horses just ran on oats. It's often hard to see the advantages of a new technology before it's hit the mainstream.
the very idea of my PC having its resources tied up for someone else's phone call is frankly maddening to me
This strikes me as an attitude of someone who can't stand the idea that he's not in control of everything (which you never are). The real question is, does it use any significant resources that effect what you're trying to do at the time? Frankly I don't really care about 20-50 megabytes of memory, or 5% of my processor usage, or even 100% of my idle processor usage. Those numbers are all low enough that you'd more than likely never notice or miss those resources. I would be concerned if the app started taking up hundreds of megabytes of memory, or 30-40% of my processor time, or locked up system resources that interfere with other apps I'm running. So which is it? The author didn't provide us with any of that information, only the extremist position that ANY useage of his computers resources that wasn't for him was unacceptable. What a useless article.
I haven't read the full paper, but the article makes this sound extremely preliminary as a usefull tool. It says they can distinguish between two users with 99% accuracy. That's all well and good when you only need to distinguish between two people, but what about when you need to distinguish between a million people?
I can distinguish between a person with blond hair and a person with brown hair given only the hair color 100% of the time. But that doesn't mean hair color is something that's a very usefull tool at positively identifying people. The key is how different peoples "click profiles" are. If there's only 1000 different possibilities (evenly distributed) that's not terribly good at idenfification. If there's 10^10 possible profiles, evenly distributed among the populace, that would certainly be usefull. Also, what's the false positive rate? If you try to use this at identifying fraud and you have a 1% false positive rate, you'll end up pissing off 1% of your customers. That's probbably not acceptable.
As for several minutes of weightlessness, you can get that from conventional aircraft.
True, but what you don't get is the blue sky disappearing to be replaced with the blackness of space. I'd also imagine you can see the curvature of the earth quite well from 60 miles up. Weightlessness is kinda cool I'm sure, but I think the selling point for all the millionaires will be the visuals, the G-forces, and of course telling all your too-rich friends that you officially went into space. I imagine if this thing is successfull it could fund the next stage, which would be an orbital vehicle.
It's be more like you and your gang all live in one neighborhood. Me and my gang live in a different neighborhood a couple miles away. We're kinda friendly, we conduct business together, but we've also taken some pot-shots at each other from time to time. We both own telescopes and point them at each others neighborhood to see if the other has bought any new machine guns, knives, or to monitor how powerfull the others gang is. You get tired of my telescope and decide to shoot a laser at it so I can't see (for the sake of the analogy, it doesn't blind anyone). I don't say much because it's not really a battle I want to fight (I've got trouble with other gangs, and don't really need trouble from one I'm kinda friendly with). I also don't fire a laser at your telescope, though I do own one and know it works.
Your ideas of extending personal privacy to soverign nations just doesn't scale. Nations aren't the same as individuals, so stop trying to apply the same principles to each.
It surely may sound ironic in the case of China, but : a sovereign nation has a right to privacy.
When it comes to Nations, privacy often only leads to instability and war. If Country A doesn't know at all what Country B doing (and not just what they're claiming to so), Country A will start believing in crazy paranoid fantasies. Of course there's always SOMEONE making up the crazy paranoid fantasies, but in the abscence of evidence to the contrary, people might listen to the crazy paranoid fantasies. Crazy paranoid fantasies lead to Country A increasing it's military powers, being on hair triggers, etc. Country B then hears that Country A is increasing it's military powers, and does the same. Rinse, repeat.
The point is that secrecy is often your own worst enemy. You WANT to know what other countries are up to, and you often WANT other countries to know what you're up to. Spy satellites helped keep the cold war cold.
500 miles? Let us say the hybrid has the efficiency similar to Prius, 50 MPG.
Terrible assumption right off the bat. The maximum possible thermodynamic efficiency of a car engine is around 50%. The efficiency of an electric motor is something like 95%. So you're already off by a factor of 2 (probbably more).
This is exactly what I thought when I read the article. Vulnerabilities aren't equal, even ignoring which browser is targeted more. Some vulnerabilities are quite difficult to exploit and might require someone to compromise the DNS lookups of a target, while other vulnerabilities you'd only have to visit a website with malicious code on it.
It'd be like grouping all crimes together between two cities. City A might have 150 incidents of shoplifting, but only 10 murders. City B might only have 100 incidents of shoplifting, but 30 murders. If you just add up the crime statistics it looks like City A is "worse" than City B with 150 crimes vs 130. But most people would be FAR more concerned about murders than shoplifting.
Why do you need a government agency to control what you don't like? Personally I hate Rush Limbaugh and never want to hear one word from his pill-popping mouth. Should I get the FCC to shut him up because I find him personally offensive?
Your plan worked! You managed to create a fad website and idiots are willing to give you 900 frickin million dollars for it! Take the money before they realize that Facebook is just a passing fad like boy-bands! Don't over-play your hand. Even Yahoo and Viacom aren't dumb enough to give you anything like 2 billion dollars for it.
The power goes out? No power to the modem, no VoIP. Or how about when the tech puts a trap on your phone because he thinks you're pirating cable? (Happened about 5 times to a friend of mine with business class cable internet). Or how well does it work when the cable company screws up, and burns out a bunch of modems with a too strong signal (happened to many people around here). Or what happens when the weather gets exceptionally hot, or exceptionally cold and wreaks havoc with the S/N ratio of the lines?
The phone lines were engineered to be very reliable. In my experience cable has been something that's been less than reliable (because no one dies if the cable goes out).
So if I arrange for someone to be killed, but don't specifiy the MEANS to do it, that's OK? "Hey, I didn't know HOW the guy was gonna get killed.. maybe it was going to happen real nice and proper like?."
Funny, I thought deception, fraud, and outright lying were wrong from the get-go. Now apparently the only thing that's wrong is HOW you go about deceiving, defrauding, and lying. If you do it properly, it's not wrong. Silly me.
That may work great for you, a person who's used to explicity following directions to the letter. But there's other types of people that'd rather have some flexibility in how they do things, aren't good at "to the letter" directions, or just don't like tedium.
It's a perfectly valid complaint about a product that it doesn't work if you didn't follow the directions TO THE LETTER. Imagine a cake recipe that was inedible if you cooked it for 9 minutes instead of 8 1/2 minutes, or at 420 degrees instead of 425 degrees. It's often difficult to follow directions perfectly, especially when there's a lot of different and complicated ones.
Really it's no different, and easy to agitate people like you are the ones who make it so much fun. You act like an aimbotter is the reincarnation of Hitler. Your emphasis on how much the game matters is what makes you an attractive target.
And here lies the depth of your disease. Do you move the pieces around in chess when your oppponent isn't looking, then get all surprised when they get mad at you for cheating? I guess that's not "the same thing" because someone just might punch you for doing something so rude, where there's no real threat on online gaming.
You don't really anger me, you just make me sad. Seek professional help. Getting pleasure out of hurting other people (however trivial and minor it may be) isn't healthy. This is especially true when it's not even someone that wronged you, but some anonymous person you'll never even meet.
For some reason the word "sociopath" keeps coming to mind when I read your post. Anyone who enjoys pissing off anonymous people in a computer game, and actively seeks that out has a screw or two loose. Perhaps you should up your meds?
I still think you're missing the point. YOU may like the cheesyness of Star Trek, but that's not what's kept it going for 40 years. There's plenty of really cheesy crappy shows our there that no one ever thinks twice about. Name me some that have the staying power of Star Trek.
Shows stay around because they remain relevent, and are generally good shows. The only shows I can think of that have comparable mass appeal so many years later are M*A*S*H*, Cheers, and The Simpsons. Those are all well made shows with good writing and acting, just like Star Trek.
do you really believe the average kid would find those ways interesting?
The average kid, no. But the discussion is about getting kids interested in programming so that means we're talking about the kid who's interested in computers and technology, not the average kid. The average kid (as well as the average adult) doesn't have the ability to program.
But seriously what could a kid do in Excel that would actually hold their interest longer than half a second?
Write a macro the does all their math homework for them, including showing work? Figure out how long it takes them to save up for a new bike? There's lots of ways a kid could be interested in Excel.
The article was interesting, but ultimately the author seemed to be concerned about recreating nostalgia for programming on his 8-bit computer rather than actually wanting kids to know how to program. There's countless examples of programming languages suitable for a kid. Bash, Excel, and Javascript are all pretty simple, don't require complex steps like compiling or memory management, and readily accessible.
Obviously the dorks at CBS/NBC/ABC or whomever seem to have missed the point: It's the cheese that makes Trek taste so good after all these years.
That's funny. I always liked TOS because of the good writing, acting, characters, and storyline. The effects weren't great, but it's not like we're talking about Land Of The Lost here. I also like the TOS doesn't take itself too seriously, something that was lost on TNG. As long as the new effects don't look worse or out of place with the rest of the series, I'd love see them.
If you want a series with bad acting, bad writing, and mediocre effects that no one watches anymore look no further than Buck Rogers. If all sci-fi fans were interested in was cheese and bad effects, this show would be in syndication everywhere. Buck Rogers is rarely played. I think I recorded an episode on my DVR that played at 3 in the morning several months ago. It was interesting to see how bad the show was, but I'd never watch another episode.
So don't sign up for a contract and buy your phone secondhand on ebay, or find a company that only goes 1 year contracts. My original Nokia 5190 finally got too annoying to use a few years ago, so I just bought a used Nokia on ebay for $30. Swap the SIM card into the new phone, and 20 seconds later my phone works perfectly. I'm happy because I got a new phone, T-mobile is happy because they didn't have to front money for a new phone to give me, the guy I bought it from is happy because he's a tech freak and needs a new toy every year.
The contract is just so the cellphone provider doesn't lose money on the phone, which they sell at less than cost.
My girlfriend had T-mobile at her old apartment and always had terrible coverage. She found out that Nextel got great reception in her building, so she switched to them. Later she switched jobs and gets no coverage from Nextel inside her work building, but my T-mobile phone works fine.
The point is that maybe you should try switching to a different provider that has better reception in your apartment/house. There's nothing inherently great about one provider over another in terms of coverage, but they do vary in their "dead/sketchy signal areas".
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I think I saw that movie. It ends when Jeff Goldbloom eventually is able to stop his mad colleague from conducting the dangerous human trials in a last scene lab fight. Unfortunately the whole lab and the research go up in a fire that results from the fight.
Seriously, why do you have to resort to ridiculous movie-plot science in an attempt to understand this? I doubt many grants are issued because of newspaper articles. It's more likely that either the researchers wanted some fame and sent out press releases, or some reporter caught wind of the research and came snooping around asking questions to naive scientists who aren't familiar with how the popular treats science.
Is it possible that human brains just have the gain set a bit higher than simply "random" on connecting temporal causal events? It might be more adventageous to notice connections between events that aren't connected (then dissmiss them) than it is to ignore events that are connected causally.
In other words, it might be better to be a little over paranoid and think that the random shuffle on an Ipod isn't random, that childhood vaccinations cause (insert disease here) than it is to miss the fact that when some people eat fruit A, they die (but not say everyone).
Putting it a bit differently, there's more cost to missing connecting certain dangerous events than there is to miss-identifying harmless events that later turn out to be non-connected.
Also, let's not forget that he needs to future-proof his solution for digital transmissions. While there's tons of NTSC equipment on the market, what does one use to broadcast in digital?
I'm no expert in TV broadcasting, but my guess is this would be most easily accomplished by some black box that converts the NTSC broadcast signal into a digital one. Sure you'd only get 480p at best, but remember this is a LOW POWER station. Just getting a digital signal out is probbably more than anyone expects.
Converting to an all digital editing, producing, etc is likely expensive (at least from what I heard a few years ago). So the tape storage system is only really one component of that.
Example: 192.168.1.2.3
Or is the goal to try and push IPv6 simply because it's "better?"
As I understand it one of the main reasons IPV4 wasn't just extended in address space was because routing becomes too difficult with such a large address space, so you need to build routing into the protocol. There's also some very cool features of IPV6 like multi-casting that's been very poorly supported under IPV4. This would allow things like broadcasting internet based TV without multi-gigabyte connections.
When the day comes that said ISP calls me up to tell me "Hey, we're changing over to IPv6 at the end of the month (or year, or whatever), so you need to be ready for it," THEN I will start worrying about how to implement it.
That'll probbably never happen (or at least not for 20 years maybe). IPV4 isn't going away, what'll happen (someday) is your ISP will one day support IPV6 and you'll be able to get an IPV6 IP address. No one is going to call you up, you'll probbably have to call them up and ask if they're supporting it.
Until then, V4 and NAT are working perfectly well for me, thanks.
Well, I'm sure horse and buggy owners thought that horses were perfectly good transportation when the car first came out too. There weren't many paved roads, the things were expensive, and took special fuel to run them where horses just ran on oats. It's often hard to see the advantages of a new technology before it's hit the mainstream.
the very idea of my PC having its resources tied up for someone else's phone call is frankly maddening to me
This strikes me as an attitude of someone who can't stand the idea that he's not in control of everything (which you never are). The real question is, does it use any significant resources that effect what you're trying to do at the time? Frankly I don't really care about 20-50 megabytes of memory, or 5% of my processor usage, or even 100% of my idle processor usage. Those numbers are all low enough that you'd more than likely never notice or miss those resources. I would be concerned if the app started taking up hundreds of megabytes of memory, or 30-40% of my processor time, or locked up system resources that interfere with other apps I'm running. So which is it? The author didn't provide us with any of that information, only the extremist position that ANY useage of his computers resources that wasn't for him was unacceptable. What a useless article.
I haven't read the full paper, but the article makes this sound extremely preliminary as a usefull tool. It says they can distinguish between two users with 99% accuracy. That's all well and good when you only need to distinguish between two people, but what about when you need to distinguish between a million people?
I can distinguish between a person with blond hair and a person with brown hair given only the hair color 100% of the time. But that doesn't mean hair color is something that's a very usefull tool at positively identifying people. The key is how different peoples "click profiles" are. If there's only 1000 different possibilities (evenly distributed) that's not terribly good at idenfification. If there's 10^10 possible profiles, evenly distributed among the populace, that would certainly be usefull. Also, what's the false positive rate? If you try to use this at identifying fraud and you have a 1% false positive rate, you'll end up pissing off 1% of your customers. That's probbably not acceptable.
As for several minutes of weightlessness, you can get
that from conventional aircraft.
True, but what you don't get is the blue sky disappearing to be replaced with the blackness of space. I'd also imagine you can see the curvature of the earth quite well from 60 miles up. Weightlessness is kinda cool I'm sure, but I think the selling point for all the millionaires will be the visuals, the G-forces, and of course telling all your too-rich friends that you officially went into space. I imagine if this thing is successfull it could fund the next stage, which would be an orbital vehicle.
It's be more like you and your gang all live in one neighborhood. Me and my gang live in a different neighborhood a couple miles away. We're kinda friendly, we conduct business together, but we've also taken some pot-shots at each other from time to time. We both own telescopes and point them at each others neighborhood to see if the other has bought any new machine guns, knives, or to monitor how powerfull the others gang is. You get tired of my telescope and decide to shoot a laser at it so I can't see (for the sake of the analogy, it doesn't blind anyone). I don't say much because it's not really a battle I want to fight (I've got trouble with other gangs, and don't really need trouble from one I'm kinda friendly with). I also don't fire a laser at your telescope, though I do own one and know it works.
Your ideas of extending personal privacy to soverign nations just doesn't scale. Nations aren't the same as individuals, so stop trying to apply the same principles to each.
It surely may sound ironic in the case of China, but : a sovereign nation has a right to privacy.
When it comes to Nations, privacy often only leads to instability and war. If Country A doesn't know at all what Country B doing (and not just what they're claiming to so), Country A will start believing in crazy paranoid fantasies. Of course there's always SOMEONE making up the crazy paranoid fantasies, but in the abscence of evidence to the contrary, people might listen to the crazy paranoid fantasies. Crazy paranoid fantasies lead to Country A increasing it's military powers, being on hair triggers, etc. Country B then hears that Country A is increasing it's military powers, and does the same. Rinse, repeat.
The point is that secrecy is often your own worst enemy. You WANT to know what other countries are up to, and you often WANT other countries to know what you're up to. Spy satellites helped keep the cold war cold.
500 miles? Let us say the hybrid has the efficiency similar to Prius, 50 MPG.
Terrible assumption right off the bat. The maximum possible thermodynamic efficiency of a car engine is around 50%. The efficiency of an electric motor is something like 95%. So you're already off by a factor of 2 (probbably more).
This is exactly what I thought when I read the article. Vulnerabilities aren't equal, even ignoring which browser is targeted more. Some vulnerabilities are quite difficult to exploit and might require someone to compromise the DNS lookups of a target, while other vulnerabilities you'd only have to visit a website with
malicious code on it.
It'd be like grouping all crimes together between two cities. City A might have 150 incidents of shoplifting, but only 10 murders. City B might only have 100 incidents of shoplifting, but 30 murders. If you just add up the crime statistics it looks like City A is "worse" than City B with 150 crimes vs 130. But most people would be FAR more concerned about murders than shoplifting.
Why do you need a government agency to control what you don't like? Personally I hate Rush Limbaugh and never want to hear one word from his pill-popping mouth. Should I get the FCC to shut him up because I find him personally offensive?
Your plan worked! You managed to create a fad website and idiots are willing to give you 900 frickin million dollars for it! Take the money before they realize that Facebook is just a passing fad like boy-bands! Don't over-play your hand. Even Yahoo and Viacom aren't dumb enough to give you anything like 2 billion dollars for it.
The power goes out? No power to the modem, no VoIP. Or how about when the tech puts a trap on your phone because he thinks you're pirating cable? (Happened about 5 times to a friend of mine with business class cable internet). Or how well does it work when the cable company screws up, and burns out a bunch of modems with a too strong signal (happened to many people around here). Or what happens when the weather gets exceptionally hot, or exceptionally cold and wreaks havoc with the S/N ratio of the lines?
The phone lines were engineered to be very reliable. In my experience cable has been something that's been less than reliable (because no one dies if the cable goes out).
So if I arrange for someone to be killed, but don't specifiy the MEANS to do it, that's OK? "Hey, I didn't know HOW the guy was gonna get killed.. maybe it was going to happen real nice and proper like?."
Funny, I thought deception, fraud, and outright lying were wrong from the get-go. Now apparently the only thing that's wrong is HOW you go about deceiving, defrauding, and lying. If you do it properly, it's not wrong. Silly me.
That may work great for you, a person who's used to explicity following directions to the letter. But there's other types of people that'd rather have some flexibility in how they do things, aren't good at "to the letter" directions, or just don't like tedium.
It's a perfectly valid complaint about a product that it doesn't work if you didn't follow the directions TO THE LETTER. Imagine a cake recipe that was inedible if you cooked it for 9 minutes instead of 8 1/2 minutes, or at 420 degrees instead of 425 degrees. It's often difficult to follow directions perfectly, especially when there's
a lot of different and complicated ones.
Really it's no different, and easy to agitate people like you are the ones who make it so much fun. You act like an aimbotter is the reincarnation of Hitler. Your emphasis on how much the game matters is what makes you an attractive target.
And here lies the depth of your disease. Do you move the pieces around in chess when your oppponent isn't looking, then get all surprised when they get mad at you for cheating? I guess that's not "the same thing" because someone just might punch you for doing something so rude, where there's no real threat on online gaming.
You don't really anger me, you just make me sad. Seek professional help. Getting pleasure out of hurting other people (however trivial and minor it may be) isn't healthy. This is especially true when it's not even someone that wronged you, but some anonymous person you'll never even meet.
For some reason the word "sociopath" keeps coming to mind when I read your post. Anyone who enjoys pissing off anonymous people in a computer game, and actively seeks that out has a screw or two loose. Perhaps you should up your meds?
I still think you're missing the point. YOU may like the cheesyness of Star Trek, but that's not what's kept it going for 40 years. There's plenty of really cheesy crappy shows our there that no one ever thinks twice about. Name me some that have the staying power of Star Trek.
Shows stay around because they remain relevent, and are generally good shows. The only shows I can think of that have comparable mass appeal so many years later are M*A*S*H*, Cheers, and The Simpsons. Those are all well made shows with good writing and acting, just like Star Trek.
do you really believe the average kid would find those ways interesting?
The average kid, no. But the discussion is about getting kids interested in programming so that means we're talking about the kid who's interested in computers and technology, not the average kid. The average kid (as well as the average adult) doesn't have the ability to program.
But seriously what could a kid do in Excel that would actually hold their interest longer than half a second?
Write a macro the does all their math homework for them, including showing work? Figure out how long it takes them to save up for a new bike? There's lots of ways a kid could be interested in Excel.
I thought the same thing.
The article was interesting, but ultimately the author seemed to be concerned about recreating nostalgia for programming on his 8-bit computer rather than actually wanting kids to know how to program. There's countless examples of programming languages suitable for a kid. Bash, Excel, and Javascript are all pretty simple, don't require complex steps like compiling or memory management, and readily accessible.
Obviously the dorks at CBS/NBC/ABC or whomever seem to have missed the point: It's the cheese that makes Trek taste so good after all these years.
That's funny. I always liked TOS because of the good writing, acting, characters, and storyline. The effects weren't great, but it's not like we're talking about Land Of The Lost here. I also like the TOS doesn't take itself too seriously, something that was lost on TNG. As long as the new effects don't look worse or out of place with the rest of the series, I'd love see them.
If you want a series with bad acting, bad writing, and mediocre effects that no one watches anymore look no further than Buck Rogers. If all sci-fi fans were interested in was cheese and bad effects, this show would be in syndication everywhere. Buck Rogers is rarely played. I think I recorded an episode on my DVR that played at 3 in the morning several months ago. It was interesting to see how bad the show was, but I'd never watch another episode.
So don't sign up for a contract and buy your phone secondhand on ebay, or find a company that only goes 1 year contracts. My original Nokia 5190 finally got too annoying to use a few years ago, so I just bought a used Nokia on ebay for $30. Swap the SIM card into the new phone, and 20 seconds later my phone works perfectly. I'm happy because I got a new phone, T-mobile is happy because they didn't have to front money for a new phone to give me, the guy I bought it from is happy because he's a tech freak and needs a new toy every year.
The contract is just so the cellphone provider doesn't lose money on the phone, which they sell at less than cost.
My girlfriend had T-mobile at her old apartment and always had terrible coverage. She found out that Nextel got great reception in her building, so she switched to them. Later she switched jobs and gets no coverage from Nextel inside her work building, but my T-mobile phone works fine.
The point is that maybe you should try switching to a different provider that has better reception in your apartment/house. There's nothing inherently great about one provider over another in terms of coverage, but they do vary in their "dead/sketchy signal areas".