Needing the know the location is to be able to route network initiated paging to the phone.
The phone does not need to know the tower location, nor does the tower need to know the phone location for this.
Otherwise, which tower would you let broadcast it.
Are you serious? The tower to which the phone is connected. You do realize, I hope, that phones make a connection to the cell site even when you aren't actively making a call. They register with a site, which is how the phone knows who the carrier is, what services are available, and can get SMS/data.
Phased array aiming is usually done by inverting the channel, the position is never directly computed.
It may never be reported in human coordinates. I don't know, it doesn't matter. The location is, however, "computed", since it is relevant to optimizing the signal and minimizing power needed for the connection.
The best pattern is not necessarily a beam pointing to you, in a non-line-of-sight scenario.
The best pattern is almost always a path going back the same way the incoming signal appears to come from. That is very very often a direct line of sight, but even if it is not, any indirect path from the low power phone will cause an incorrect position. That incorrect position will probably be fixed if the phone moves (as mobile or portable phones tend to), and still generates the optimal return path.
No.
The cell tower announces its location to the phone.
No. The cell tower announces its existence to the phone. The phone doesn't care where the tower is.
The phone announces its desire to connect to the tower.
Yes. At that point, the cell tower becomes interested in where the phone is so it can optimize service. I.e., use phase array antenna systems to direct the signal toward the phone.
The cell tower uses the same phased array antennas to figure out what direction the phone is, and the received signal strength to estimate distance. It can also use time-of-flight or response time of the phone for distance. Distance is important because it changes the signal timing in LTE.
The business of a tower inferring your phone's location came later and was all to do with selling 'location services',
No. It came along later in cell history, but not for the reason you claim. The early cell technology was not advanced enough to do the location.
The FBI said, "We don't think we can prosecute her because we don't think we can show that she broke the law as the law is written."
What Comey actually said:
"Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."
If that is true, then remind me why we do business with them at all?
Because of the lure of cheap labor, the common idea that "it won't happen to me", and/or the product is short-lived anyway and by the time the Chinese start flooding the market with cheap clones you'll have made all the money you are going to from that fad.
Or you count on the fact that the Chinese cheap clones are cheaply made and people will still buy your better quality product. People still do buy Yaesu ham radios even though Baofeng and Wouxon and others have clones. Some people don't want to have to open up a brand new radio to drill out the tiny hole for the microphone that is almost obscured in the cheap Baofeng casting, or they prefer not to have marginally legal radios, for example.
Amazon will happily deliver your shipment to a locker in any of a number of semi-public places. Unfortunately for me, the closest ones are all 45 miles away...
I was talking about consumers in general, not specifically you or me. Anecdotal individual evidence doesn't change, however, the tendencies of many other people. I rarely go to the B&M to research anything, but I often find myself seeing something on a shelf that I will investigate later. And specific to Kohls, if something isn't a heavy loss-leader or on big discount, I don't buy anything from them. The last time I was in one at all was because I had gotten a gift certificate. That taught me about their prices.
This is apparently enough of a problem for some places that they prohibit taking pictures of stuff on their shelves.
^ Person who has never had to maintain software written by a biologist detected.
I've had to maintain code written by physical scientists and I can attest to the fact that they write code using empirical testing and not thinking about what they are doing.
For example, one math guy wrote a bunch of code in Pascal that I had to translate to FORTRAN. After doing that, I noticed that he wasn't initializing any of his arrays, and that starting with all-zero entries resulted in all-zero answers. Well, he said, he didn't initialize them to anything because the random values they started with worked well. Can anyone guess one difference between the Pascal compiler he used and standard FORTRAN?
A highly respected physical scientist (and a bunch of his grad students) wrote a large program in FORTRAN, and when I ran it it crashed horribly while reading the input parameters from a file. It was THEIR EXAMPLE input. It boiled down to a failure to properly deal with a line that had no colon as a label:value separator and returned a -1 index for the "colon", which their version of FORTRAN ignored in a memory copy, but my version of FORTRAN did not. Can you think of what happens when you try to copy memory using a function that accepts unsigned input when you send it a -1 for the starting address?
Computer scientists are not where coders come from. Why would they get ANY extra money over anyone else when it comes to something they didn't really learn to do in college anyway?
One recent UPS survey found that around 70 percent of consumers tend to make new purchases in the course of returning items in stores.
And many other surveys find that people go to brick and mortar stores to browse and see product in person and then go online to buy it from a cheaper source. The only time I buy something else from a brick and mortar after a return is if I am returning something THEY sold me and I am getting store credit.
Either Kohls is expecting that their super fantastic sale prices on loss-leaders will get Amazon customers to buy (which means a loss overall), or they have ignored the fact that the customers they are counting on to buy from them after returning an Amazon product are well aware of how to buy things from online stores and already have a purchasing account with at least one of them.
Did UPSs surveys take into account that Amazon customers have Amazon accounts already and know how to check out prices online, or were they biased because they included online-phobes who only buy from B&M?
There may just not be enough verified purchasers out there.
If nobody is buying it, then why do they need reviews to assist people in buying it?
If you allow anybody to review, the reviews will just be 48.2 positive to 46.1 negative and not based at all on the content.
Which is kinda why I said that they ought not to be doing the thing that is causing their problem to start with, and then blaming others for the problem they created.
If you're looking to *sell* books, then whenever you have an author about whom people have strong opinions, you want to restrict reviews to those who actually purchased the book because
No, you want to restrict reviews to positive reviews, because any negatives may very well cause someone not to buy it from you, especially if you assume that anyone who bought the book and was allowed to review it was already a sycophant and if there were any negatives the book must really be bad.
(2) anybody who is considering buying the book really only wants to hear reviews from others who like the author.
Sorry, but hearing only from people who will base their review on liking the author isn't honest. I've bought books written by people I don't like. I have both of Obama's tomes, for example. I don't care what people who love Obama think of them. I bought them because they give great insight into him, which I am sure the Obama supporters didn't actually want to happen.
The only two reviews that are meaningful are "I like Hillary and thought the book was great" and "I like Hillary but the book sucks."
Because anyone who doesn't like Hil obviously has no literary abilities and cannot offer an honest review. "I hate Hilary but the book was well written, well researched, and makes some very good points" is useless? Not that she'd get that kind of review, since most reviews don't go anywhere near the literary merits of what they are reviewing. "Great book" means nothing as to merit.
I have no idea why anybody would expect Amazon to do anything other than exactly what they did here.
No, they deleted reviews written by people who hadn't actually *bought* the book. You can't have read the book if you didn't *buy* it.
I've read lots of books I haven't bought from Amazon. If your only access to books is through Amazon, you need to go upstairs and ask Mom and Dad about something called "a library" or "a bookstore". My county library even loans out electronic versions of books!
No idea how this flamebait got modded up.
Because Amazon should be clear and consistent in allowing only people who have bought a book from Amazon to write reviews for all books, or not try claiming it is removing reviews for only some books because the reviewer didn't buy a copy from Amazon. I'd be perfectly happy if they did the former. I think it is pretty stupid that they do allow non-purchasers to write reviews, simply because it creates the problem they are allegedly trying to solve now.
The prevailing attitude in East Asian countries (slowly changing) is that if you didn't take sufficient measures to safeguard your company's secrets and they got stolen, it's your own damn fault.
This is a common attitude among many people who use the Internet. If you let something appear on the Internet for any reason at any time, behind a paywall/login or otherwise, even by accident or as the result of a simple hack, it is public domain.
Are you also going to assume spherical cows, are are we going to discuss the real world
You mean "real world" where no company is going to come into an area, build a headquarters, and hire 50,000 people just to fire them in a year, and that paying someone who has no job $15k means that he has $15k that he wouldn't otherwise have? Or "real world" where Amazon is going to open a headquarters in a city, hire 50,000 office workers at minimum wage to run the corporation, and then replace them all with robots in just a year? Who has the spherical cows?
where corporations are amoral, sociopathic, and hire enough lawyers and accountants to make sure that they win no matter what?
Are these "lawyers and accountants" the ones they're replacing with robots after hiring them for a year?
Then they put 50,000 minimum wage jobs that last a year.
First, that 50,000 jobs that weren't there before. Second, churn is an avoidable expense, so no company is looking to turn over their 50,000 person workforce every year. It costs a lot less to keep the same already trained employee on the job than to get rid of him after a year just because.
I always feel the idea of this sort of incentive is just admitting that the taxes are driving away businesses.
Has there ever been any question that taxes have a negative impact on business siting decisions? I think it is pretty well known that taxes fall into the "lesser of two (or more) evils" category when a company decides where to locate, not "gee this tax is really great for business, let's site there."
but they would all be better off if no one offered them.
Nope. Those jurisdictions with lower taxes would be better off because they would be more attractive. Preventing local government (you know, the local people elected to deal with local matters) from governing would put jurisdictions with higher tax rates at a disadvantage.
Preventing this sort of self-destructive competition
The vary large number of cities that benefited from economic incentives for business would disagree that this is self-destructive.
and reforming silly zoning laws that keep startups out of garages.
As a property owner, I am quite happy that the guy next door cannot set up an auto repair shop in his garage, or many other "startup" businesses that are not well suited to residential neighborhoods.
Some guy walking around while the train decelerates at 19 g is going to be a nasty stain, and probably kill anyone he hits.
Even if everyone is strapped in, the carry-on items that aren't properly enclosed, and anything passengers are carrying, will not be, and a can of Coke smacking you in the back of the head at even 100MPH (much less 700) is going to hurt alot.
I agree that sabotage is a legitimate security concern, though rail also has this weakness and it - for whatever reason - is not often exploited.
Rail sabotage results in a train going off the tracks and some damage. You can see the results, and it happens for all kinds of reasons today. Sabotaging a hyperloop train would result in hundreds of people being turned into jelly deep underground where imagination will easily trump reality. And hundreds more being trapped because of the clogged tube.
A few years ago the world's interest was captured by 37 miners in Chile, I think it was. Trapped underground by an accident. Imagine 300 people trapped underground in a sabotaged hyperloop. That's going to create a huge media whirlpool.
I saw a comment about "being able to avoid the airport" or something like that, as if Hyperloop travel will not interest TSA or have any of the security overhead -- or involve going to one terminal that serves an area (like an airport). The first hyperloop failure that even hints of sabotage will result in cries for the same security theater airports have.
I think there would be time to slow or stop the passenger cars if the system encountered failure.
Imagine a tube breach behind a pod. Suddenly, 14.7PSI pushing the pod in addition to the maglev. Will the brakes handle that, or will the destination terminal turn into a big popgun spitting pods out?
Slashdot Mirror
Needing the know the location is to be able to route network initiated paging to the phone.
The phone does not need to know the tower location, nor does the tower need to know the phone location for this.
Otherwise, which tower would you let broadcast it.
Are you serious? The tower to which the phone is connected. You do realize, I hope, that phones make a connection to the cell site even when you aren't actively making a call. They register with a site, which is how the phone knows who the carrier is, what services are available, and can get SMS/data.
Phased array aiming is usually done by inverting the channel, the position is never directly computed.
It may never be reported in human coordinates. I don't know, it doesn't matter. The location is, however, "computed", since it is relevant to optimizing the signal and minimizing power needed for the connection.
The best pattern is not necessarily a beam pointing to you, in a non-line-of-sight scenario.
The best pattern is almost always a path going back the same way the incoming signal appears to come from. That is very very often a direct line of sight, but even if it is not, any indirect path from the low power phone will cause an incorrect position. That incorrect position will probably be fixed if the phone moves (as mobile or portable phones tend to), and still generates the optimal return path.
No. The cell tower announces its location to the phone.
No. The cell tower announces its existence to the phone. The phone doesn't care where the tower is.
The phone announces its desire to connect to the tower.
Yes. At that point, the cell tower becomes interested in where the phone is so it can optimize service. I.e., use phase array antenna systems to direct the signal toward the phone.
The cell tower uses the same phased array antennas to figure out what direction the phone is, and the received signal strength to estimate distance. It can also use time-of-flight or response time of the phone for distance. Distance is important because it changes the signal timing in LTE.
The business of a tower inferring your phone's location came later and was all to do with selling 'location services',
No. It came along later in cell history, but not for the reason you claim. The early cell technology was not advanced enough to do the location.
The FBI said, "We don't think we can prosecute her because we don't think we can show that she broke the law as the law is written."
What Comey actually said:
"Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."
That's something VERY different.
For those first reviews, you have to accept whoever writes them.
But not, apparently, if they are negative.
Once you have a large enough set of reviews, you may want to drop the non-verified reviews.
Amazon is also dropping verified purchaser reviews.
It might add some credibility to the review system to be more consistent,
Do you think?
but in the end, they are *not* trying to provide the most helpful reviews.
Which is another strike against the credibility of the system.
They are trying to provide the set of reviews that are most helpful to the *pool of potential purchasers*.
In this case, they are trying to provide reviews that are most helpful to the seller. I.e., Amazon.
If there is a prohibition against taking pictures of merchandise it is really just a way of intimidating people into putting their phones away.
They had no problem with people using their phones to chat, so no, this wasn't just a way to get people to put them away.
Women respond to that type of coercion.
Yeah, whatever.
If that is true, then remind me why we do business with them at all?
Because of the lure of cheap labor, the common idea that "it won't happen to me", and/or the product is short-lived anyway and by the time the Chinese start flooding the market with cheap clones you'll have made all the money you are going to from that fad.
Or you count on the fact that the Chinese cheap clones are cheaply made and people will still buy your better quality product. People still do buy Yaesu ham radios even though Baofeng and Wouxon and others have clones. Some people don't want to have to open up a brand new radio to drill out the tiny hole for the microphone that is almost obscured in the cheap Baofeng casting, or they prefer not to have marginally legal radios, for example.
Amazon will happily deliver your shipment to a locker in any of a number of semi-public places. Unfortunately for me, the closest ones are all 45 miles away...
Note: I have no opinion on the book and would have preferred HRC be elected over Trump.
I want to get a copy just to see if she really did try blaming her loss on the teenaged girl that her assistant's husband (Weiner) was caught sexting.
This is apparently enough of a problem for some places that they prohibit taking pictures of stuff on their shelves.
^ Person who has never had to maintain software written by a biologist detected.
I've had to maintain code written by physical scientists and I can attest to the fact that they write code using empirical testing and not thinking about what they are doing.
For example, one math guy wrote a bunch of code in Pascal that I had to translate to FORTRAN. After doing that, I noticed that he wasn't initializing any of his arrays, and that starting with all-zero entries resulted in all-zero answers. Well, he said, he didn't initialize them to anything because the random values they started with worked well. Can anyone guess one difference between the Pascal compiler he used and standard FORTRAN?
A highly respected physical scientist (and a bunch of his grad students) wrote a large program in FORTRAN, and when I ran it it crashed horribly while reading the input parameters from a file. It was THEIR EXAMPLE input. It boiled down to a failure to properly deal with a line that had no colon as a label:value separator and returned a -1 index for the "colon", which their version of FORTRAN ignored in a memory copy, but my version of FORTRAN did not. Can you think of what happens when you try to copy memory using a function that accepts unsigned input when you send it a -1 for the starting address?
Computer scientists are not where coders come from. Why would they get ANY extra money over anyone else when it comes to something they didn't really learn to do in college anyway?
One recent UPS survey found that around 70 percent of consumers tend to make new purchases in the course of returning items in stores.
And many other surveys find that people go to brick and mortar stores to browse and see product in person and then go online to buy it from a cheaper source. The only time I buy something else from a brick and mortar after a return is if I am returning something THEY sold me and I am getting store credit.
Either Kohls is expecting that their super fantastic sale prices on loss-leaders will get Amazon customers to buy (which means a loss overall), or they have ignored the fact that the customers they are counting on to buy from them after returning an Amazon product are well aware of how to buy things from online stores and already have a purchasing account with at least one of them.
Did UPSs surveys take into account that Amazon customers have Amazon accounts already and know how to check out prices online, or were they biased because they included online-phobes who only buy from B&M?
There may just not be enough verified purchasers out there.
If nobody is buying it, then why do they need reviews to assist people in buying it?
If you allow anybody to review, the reviews will just be 48.2 positive to 46.1 negative and not based at all on the content.
Which is kinda why I said that they ought not to be doing the thing that is causing their problem to start with, and then blaming others for the problem they created.
If you're looking to *sell* books, then whenever you have an author about whom people have strong opinions, you want to restrict reviews to those who actually purchased the book because
No, you want to restrict reviews to positive reviews, because any negatives may very well cause someone not to buy it from you, especially if you assume that anyone who bought the book and was allowed to review it was already a sycophant and if there were any negatives the book must really be bad.
(2) anybody who is considering buying the book really only wants to hear reviews from others who like the author.
Sorry, but hearing only from people who will base their review on liking the author isn't honest. I've bought books written by people I don't like. I have both of Obama's tomes, for example. I don't care what people who love Obama think of them. I bought them because they give great insight into him, which I am sure the Obama supporters didn't actually want to happen.
The only two reviews that are meaningful are "I like Hillary and thought the book was great" and "I like Hillary but the book sucks."
Because anyone who doesn't like Hil obviously has no literary abilities and cannot offer an honest review. "I hate Hilary but the book was well written, well researched, and makes some very good points" is useless? Not that she'd get that kind of review, since most reviews don't go anywhere near the literary merits of what they are reviewing. "Great book" means nothing as to merit.
I have no idea why anybody would expect Amazon to do anything other than exactly what they did here.
Because honesty?
And if you think the UK is a nanny state, what about the US? They won't even let you by a haggis there.
I _thought_ this page looked fishy. Good to know it is a trap for unsuspecting US haggis buyers....
No, they deleted reviews written by people who hadn't actually *bought* the book. You can't have read the book if you didn't *buy* it.
I've read lots of books I haven't bought from Amazon. If your only access to books is through Amazon, you need to go upstairs and ask Mom and Dad about something called "a library" or "a bookstore". My county library even loans out electronic versions of books!
No idea how this flamebait got modded up.
Because Amazon should be clear and consistent in allowing only people who have bought a book from Amazon to write reviews for all books, or not try claiming it is removing reviews for only some books because the reviewer didn't buy a copy from Amazon. I'd be perfectly happy if they did the former. I think it is pretty stupid that they do allow non-purchasers to write reviews, simply because it creates the problem they are allegedly trying to solve now.
The prevailing attitude in East Asian countries (slowly changing) is that if you didn't take sufficient measures to safeguard your company's secrets and they got stolen, it's your own damn fault.
This is a common attitude among many people who use the Internet. If you let something appear on the Internet for any reason at any time, behind a paywall/login or otherwise, even by accident or as the result of a simple hack, it is public domain.
Are you also going to assume spherical cows, are are we going to discuss the real world
You mean "real world" where no company is going to come into an area, build a headquarters, and hire 50,000 people just to fire them in a year, and that paying someone who has no job $15k means that he has $15k that he wouldn't otherwise have? Or "real world" where Amazon is going to open a headquarters in a city, hire 50,000 office workers at minimum wage to run the corporation, and then replace them all with robots in just a year? Who has the spherical cows?
where corporations are amoral, sociopathic, and hire enough lawyers and accountants to make sure that they win no matter what?
Are these "lawyers and accountants" the ones they're replacing with robots after hiring them for a year?
corporate welfare
Somehow I don't think Amazon needs a tax break from any local government to stay in business. It's hard to call it welfare otherwise.
It is, however, often a good deal for the citizens, so maybe calling it "citizen welfare" would be the right term.
A minimum wage job is about $15k a year. Two parents, family of 2 at that wage
Minimum wage was not and is not intended to be a wage for four people.
You end up attracting people to the area that cost the state more than they earn.
You end up paying people already in the area $15k more than they had.
And no company is going to come into a town, hire 50,000 people, and then fire all of them after just one year.
Your sentiment is a clear demonstration of the antagonistic attitude towards business in America.
Yeah, 'cause showing support for governments giving incentives to businesses to locate in their jurisdictions is just so, umm, anti-business. Right.
And every package going to the US subject to US customs inspection and confiscation, and potential tariffs ... it's a win/win!
Then they put 50,000 minimum wage jobs that last a year.
First, that 50,000 jobs that weren't there before. Second, churn is an avoidable expense, so no company is looking to turn over their 50,000 person workforce every year. It costs a lot less to keep the same already trained employee on the job than to get rid of him after a year just because.
I always feel the idea of this sort of incentive is just admitting that the taxes are driving away businesses.
Has there ever been any question that taxes have a negative impact on business siting decisions? I think it is pretty well known that taxes fall into the "lesser of two (or more) evils" category when a company decides where to locate, not "gee this tax is really great for business, let's site there."
but they would all be better off if no one offered them.
Nope. Those jurisdictions with lower taxes would be better off because they would be more attractive. Preventing local government (you know, the local people elected to deal with local matters) from governing would put jurisdictions with higher tax rates at a disadvantage.
Preventing this sort of self-destructive competition
The vary large number of cities that benefited from economic incentives for business would disagree that this is self-destructive.
and reforming silly zoning laws that keep startups out of garages.
As a property owner, I am quite happy that the guy next door cannot set up an auto repair shop in his garage, or many other "startup" businesses that are not well suited to residential neighborhoods.
Some guy walking around while the train decelerates at 19 g is going to be a nasty stain, and probably kill anyone he hits.
Even if everyone is strapped in, the carry-on items that aren't properly enclosed, and anything passengers are carrying, will not be, and a can of Coke smacking you in the back of the head at even 100MPH (much less 700) is going to hurt alot.
I agree that sabotage is a legitimate security concern, though rail also has this weakness and it - for whatever reason - is not often exploited.
Rail sabotage results in a train going off the tracks and some damage. You can see the results, and it happens for all kinds of reasons today. Sabotaging a hyperloop train would result in hundreds of people being turned into jelly deep underground where imagination will easily trump reality. And hundreds more being trapped because of the clogged tube.
A few years ago the world's interest was captured by 37 miners in Chile, I think it was. Trapped underground by an accident. Imagine 300 people trapped underground in a sabotaged hyperloop. That's going to create a huge media whirlpool.
I saw a comment about "being able to avoid the airport" or something like that, as if Hyperloop travel will not interest TSA or have any of the security overhead -- or involve going to one terminal that serves an area (like an airport). The first hyperloop failure that even hints of sabotage will result in cries for the same security theater airports have.
I think there would be time to slow or stop the passenger cars if the system encountered failure.
Imagine a tube breach behind a pod. Suddenly, 14.7PSI pushing the pod in addition to the maglev. Will the brakes handle that, or will the destination terminal turn into a big popgun spitting pods out?