What is the core thesis of the book? With a title like that, are they talking about super imposing your mind onto a body that you think is real but really isn't?
The thing is that Matrix is not supposed to be deep.
The Matrix absolutely was supposed to be a deep film. Consider:
"Neo" is an anagram for "One"
"Morpheus" is a the Greek god of dreams
"Trinity" answers the phrase "God!" with "What?"
"Zion" is the name of God's Holy Mountain/City after the apocalypse
Neo follows a white rabbit to meet Trinity (and indirectly Morpheus). Morpheus tells Neo that he must feel like Alice in Wonderland, "tumbling down the rabbit hole".
I'm not talking about "maybe they were sort of refering to a Messiah." These are concrete literary references to Anagrams, Greek Mythology, Old Testament Bible references, modern Christian Theology, and even Lewis Carrol. The Matrix is absolutely a well thought out literary piece.
You're supposed to plug your brain into it for two hours and enjoy old fashioned mayhem. Not everything has to have literary depth in order to be a good movie.
I don't think you're "supposed" to do anything when watching the movie except enjoy it. If you enjoy all the ass kicking action, that's great. If you enjoy the deep literary references and well constructed plot, that's great too. There's certainly nothing wrong with enjoy the movie on a higher level. That higher level was absolutely intended by the directors.
And no, not everything needs literary depth to be a good movie. The Matrix is a good movie even without that depth. But the presence of that depth is what makes The Matrix a great movie.
The problem is that switching from one standard to another standard has a huge investment cost, and the profits don't actually make up for the initial investment for years (possibly a decade), when there is another standard.
Think of it like upgrading a computer. You never upgrade CPUs from 233 mhz to 266 mhz to 300 mhz to 350 and so on. You do wait as long as you can with what works (P133 to P2-350 in my case) to minimize investment cost.
I work at Motorola, and I can verify that people here are still working on Analog and PDC (a precursor to digital).
It seems like every week or so some article comes out which bashs some point about Open Source/Free Software/Linux/etc. Inevitably a bunch of people flame the article, and then a few people post intelligent comments saying, "We should really do something to fix this problem." Wouldn't it be better to have a special label for posts like this? Not "insightful", but "inspirational" or "pro-active" or something. I'd much rather we as a community actually fixed these problems rather than just state that they need fixing.
Also, lots of comments are labelled "informative" just because they have a URL to some useful reference. Could we have a separate name for these posts, different from posts that actually contain information?
I don't understand why the FTC needs to enforce this control. Last time I checked, getting internet access is at least $10/mo + $300 for a computer-- that's just bare bones, dirt cheap system with a 14.4kb bottle neck for an internet connection. Most kids don't have this much money. (I'm refering to 12 year olds, not the 17 year old "kids" who already know what naked women look like and drink more than their parents.)
Parents, if you don't want your kinds to look at pr0n, monitor their computer use. It's still YOUR computer, not theirs. If they know more about it than you, it's your responsibility to learn about the computer and wrest control back. Remember, understanding is the key to true power, whether its understanding of people or understanding of computers.
This article seems to say: "Ra ra, Nanotech is amazing and will change your life in 50 years. You'll be living in a virtual paradise with all of the world's problems solved." Forgive me for not being so optimistic.
First, the time constraint. The article claims these things could likely be a reality in 50 or 100 years, citing the discoveries we've made in the past 100 years. But remember that Alan Turing claimed that we'd have AI capable of perfectly imitating a human by the year 2000, and we're nowhere near that. 100 years-- maybe. 50 years? No.
The article also claimed that the only factory jobs would be design and structuring. Tiny little robots would do all the work. Ignoring the problem of power supplies, I remember the words of Frank Herbert's Dune: "Machines didn't free men. They only allowed men with machines to enslave other men."
Or what about "synthesizing food to stop world hunger"? The major cause of famines is not lack of FOOD, but lack of MONEY. When you get right down to it, plant organisms are remarkably efficient at building food, far more efficient than robots building food could be. Enough food exists in the world for everyone to be fat and lazy, but the starving people can't afford to buy it.
Similar rebuttals apply to the rest of the claims. Common sense: 1, Pie in the Sky: 0.
I am consistantly amazed at John's integrity every time I read something he's written. It seems like everything he says, he's thought about and has a good reason for it. If he's not sure, he says so. He doesn't walk into problems with a preconceived notion of "the best" solution, as exemplified by his choice of NT as their platform for development.
But hearing his description of his youth, he clearly wasn't always this ethical.:) Was it really the six months of real programming that turned him around? I'm curious how exactly he had a change of heart, because I know many many people who just balk whenever someone tries to teach them anything.
I guess what I'm asking is, "To what extent is John Carmack's integrity a natural extension of born love for the 'best solution'? To what extent did he learn integrity?"
Incidently, I think that John's ethics are one of the two main reasons he's *universally* beloved by gamers (unlike John Romero). The reason is that Carmack makes really kick ass games.:)
This article has all the ear marks of a crack pot theoretical physicist whom no one listens to.
The author of this article, Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist who lives near Oxford, UK.
First, notice how he's not actually working at any university, but cites that he "lives near Oxford" as if that makes him smarter. He also does NOT state what kind of degree he has and where it's from. (Not that degrees make one smart, but when the rest of the article is suspect, the degree is too.)
Consider this paragraph:
The notion of time as an invisible framework that contains and constrains the Universe is not unlike the crystal spheres invented centuries ago to carry the planets. After the spheres had been shattered by Tycho Brahe's observations, Kepler said: "We must philosophise about these things differently." Much of modern physics stems from this insight. We need a new notion of time.
He's basically saying, "You might think I'm crazy but I'm really as insightful as Kepler! Save yourself the embarassment and support my ideas now!" Of course, Kepler actually came up with real equations, and Kepler's Laws provided meaningful insight into planetary motion. This article's author has not provided anything useful.
Here is the best support he can muster from other physicists:
Americans Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler combined quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of general relativity to produce an equation that describes the whole Universe. Put into the equation a configuration of the Universe, and out comes a probability for that configuration. There is no mention of time. Admittedly, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is controversial and fraught with mathematical difficulties...
Wow, his best cite is contraversial and came up with a useless mathematical equation. He's really just using the idea that for any configuration of the universe, there is a probability that it exists. (But doesn't his article state that all configurations of the universe exist? We just experience them one at a time? Hmmm, sounds like a contradiction...)
The feeling I got from reading this article was that the author wasn't taken seriously by the academic community because his ideas are some subset of: {Trivial, Unprovable, Useless}. If this is an average article for Julian, then I agree with the academics.
Consider the set of all possible configurations of all particles in the universe. (He names this set Platonia.) Arrange the set so that configurations which are similar are close to each other. In other words, the configuration where I've just gotten out of my chair is close to the configuration where I'm about to get out of my chair, but they're both really far from the configuration where I'm on an airplane flying to Bombay.
He then defines the "arrows" of time as a straight "track" traced between different configurations. Each configuration contains data which has records of "the past"-- other configurations on the same track. Essentially he's changed the definition of the Universe. What we consider "the universe" is a single element of the set he names Platonia. But he names Platonia the universe-- the set of all possible particle configurations.
Let me use his arguments to prove that distance doesn't exist. "Consider what we think of as points on the real line. The point 1 and the point 4 have a distance of three. But there's really an infinite number of points, and they're all connected. I will define the real line R as a point. Distance has no meaning to the real line so distance must not exist! What we think of as distance is really just the separation between two different instantiations of our point R." Technically stated this is true. He's redefining terms in such a way that they're no longer meaningful.
On the bright side, if he could get from "Time doesn't exist" to "consider a set that contains the concept of time", he might be able to theorize something useful.
I'm going to comment on his credentials in a later post...
My source of information is a good friend of mine who is a well known registered nutritionist. (For example, she was invited by the Communist Chinese government to visit China and lecture their doctors. Not only was she allowed into Bejing, but she was also asked to visit some hospitals out in the more rural areas.)
The primary cause of Bipolar disorders is extreme stress. The real "catch" is the definition of stress. Extreme stress could mean chemical stress on the body (eg. using narcotics), emotional stress (eg. going through a divorce), time pressures (eg. Prepare a PhD Thesis defense), and so on.
I think she's been looking into ways to increase the body's ability to cope with stress, which can remove the bipolar disorder. In particular, detecting which bio-chemical disorders appear in bipolar patients and whether fixing those disorders reverse the disorder.
Very few computer games have revolutionized the industry by creating and popularizing new genres. (Wolfenstein 3D, Civilization, Myst/7th Guest, Command and Conquer, and Ultima Online are the only examples I can think of.) Each game genre became possible because of a new piece of hardware that became available (eg. decent video card for Wolfenstein, CD-ROM for Myst and 7th Guest, internet access for Ultima Online). It's clear that today's hardware advances will provide richer 3d games, but will this hardware bring us a new game genre? If so, could you elaborate on what that genre might be and how it differs from previous game concepts?
A few months ago I remember you were interested in the problem of computer vision, citing it was "the opposite of computer graphics." Did you ever look into this? If so, did your research have a direct impact on the Q3 artificial intelligence?
In what ways could computer vision research benefeit future computer graphics development?
I did some testing and the minimal search string is "More Satan". If you delete either word or try "Satan More", you won't get the same number one hit.
So clearly Google has some mechanism for filtering specific search strings and defining the number one hit (aka. the "I'm feeling lucky" button). Perhaps they will fund themselves by selling out the "I'm feeling lucky" button responses. I'm sure the "Pr0N" search string would sell quickly.
This raises the lesser evil question. Would you rather have banner ads or corrupted searches? Clearly this depends on the scope of the ads (check out this anagram website) and how many search slots they sell (ever use Yahoo?).
Methinks such folk should scale back their expectations a bit. After all its only ones and zeros. Tiny little switches on a hunk of silicon. It will be cool, but not immediately world-changing.
I'm sure we all know that ideas are some of the most valuable commodities in the world-- why else would the slashdot community care so much about privacy? But ideas don't do anything on their own until you have some hardware to prove the idea. Do you really want someone else to take your idea before you prove it empyrically?
The only project that compares in secrecy is the Manhattan Project, and that definatly changed the world. But more importantly, it changed the way we thought.
The Manhattan Project's idea was, "Atoms can be split and produce a lot of energy." What if Transmetta has another very simple yet profound idea? "It's only ones and zeros"? Maybe it's NOT ones and zeros any more. And therein lies the reason for secrecy.
There are two reasons for extreme secrecy. Either you really do have something important to hide (think Manhattan Project) or you want to drum up interest (think GeForce 256). But if you're just drumming up interest, you need to let a few crumbs slip. Transmetta's air-tight secrecy is not worth its cost of implementation if they're not actually hiding anything worthwhile.
In short, I think they're really onto something. It will probably change the way we think about Silicon, ones and zeros, and so on.
All Solow's Paradox proves is that the real bottleneck in labor is the human mind, not rote labor. Before there were calculators, people had to add 12 + 132 in their heads before they came up with 144. Now people need to find the buttons 1, 2, 3, + and = on a calculator. The calculator is doing the routine labor, but the amount of time it takes to get the answer is the same.
In other words, people are spending less effort due to computers, but aren't more efficient. Effort relates to rote "assembly line" labor. Efficiency comes from the human mind, and computers haven't made any improvements on the mind last time I checked. Hence productivity remains constant, even before the BSOD existed.
Everything in this world is explainable, you just don't have all the information. (Except for that new Coke flavor thing they created awhile back...why did they do that ?:-)
Well... The best theory I heard was this. The expensive part of soda is the syrup, not the sugared, carbonated water. If you've had older sodas, you'll notice that there is a much higher syrup to water ratio. Coke and Pepsi have been slowly decreasing the syrup to water ratio over decades to lower costs. New Coke was an attempt to speed up the process. They spent a lot of money on a marketting campagne to convince people that they liked a lower syrup to water ratio. But when people compared Old Coke with New Coke, it was clear that more syrup just tasted better.
A lot like Micros~1 spending lots of money convincing people that they like Windows 2000 a lot more than whatever else they had, but when you've tried Linux, you know what a real operating system runs like.
Actually, Iridium failed purely because of bad business logistics. Iridium provides a way of using one cell phone anywhere in the world, regardless of whether or not you're near a cell base station. However, there has been such a boom in the cellular service industry that even many third world countries have cell base stations. Iridium didn't provide a market demanded service. It's sort of nice that you can connect through a satellite, but certainly not necessary-- or cost effective. I heard the first Iridium phones sold for $3000.
If Iridium had launched five years ago, maybe the technology need would have been there, but the cost would have been even more prohibitive. Iridium is living proof that hype doesn't pay the bills.
Incidently, they had 20,000 subscribers, and needed 1,000,000 to break even.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the core thesis of the book? With a title like that, are they talking about super imposing your mind onto a body that you think is real but really isn't?
-Ted
The Matrix absolutely was supposed to be a deep film. Consider:
I'm not talking about "maybe they were sort of refering to a Messiah." These are concrete literary references to Anagrams, Greek Mythology, Old Testament Bible references, modern Christian Theology, and even Lewis Carrol. The Matrix is absolutely a well thought out literary piece.
You're supposed to plug your brain into it for two hours and enjoy old fashioned mayhem. Not everything has to have literary depth in order to be a good movie.
I don't think you're "supposed" to do anything when watching the movie except enjoy it. If you enjoy all the ass kicking action, that's great. If you enjoy the deep literary references and well constructed plot, that's great too. There's certainly nothing wrong with enjoy the movie on a higher level. That higher level was absolutely intended by the directors.
And no, not everything needs literary depth to be a good movie. The Matrix is a good movie even without that depth. But the presence of that depth is what makes The Matrix a great movie.
-Ted
The problem is that switching from one standard to another standard has a huge investment cost, and the profits don't actually make up for the initial investment for years (possibly a decade), when there is another standard.
Think of it like upgrading a computer. You never upgrade CPUs from 233 mhz to 266 mhz to 300 mhz to 350 and so on. You do wait as long as you can with what works (P133 to P2-350 in my case) to minimize investment cost.
I work at Motorola, and I can verify that people here are still working on Analog and PDC (a precursor to digital).
-Ted
It seems like every week or so some article comes out which bashs some point about Open Source/Free Software/Linux/etc. Inevitably a bunch of people flame the article, and then a few people post intelligent comments saying, "We should really do something to fix this problem." Wouldn't it be better to have a special label for posts like this? Not "insightful", but "inspirational" or "pro-active" or something. I'd much rather we as a community actually fixed these problems rather than just state that they need fixing.
Also, lots of comments are labelled "informative" just because they have a URL to some useful reference. Could we have a separate name for these posts, different from posts that actually contain information?
Just my two cents...
-Ted
I don't understand why the FTC needs to enforce this control. Last time I checked, getting internet access is at least $10/mo + $300 for a computer-- that's just bare bones, dirt cheap system with a 14.4kb bottle neck for an internet connection. Most kids don't have this much money. (I'm refering to 12 year olds, not the 17 year old "kids" who already know what naked women look like and drink more than their parents.)
Parents, if you don't want your kinds to look at pr0n, monitor their computer use. It's still YOUR computer, not theirs. If they know more about it than you, it's your responsibility to learn about the computer and wrest control back. Remember, understanding is the key to true power, whether its understanding of people or understanding of computers.
-Ted
This article seems to say: "Ra ra, Nanotech is amazing and will change your life in 50 years. You'll be living in a virtual paradise with all of the world's problems solved." Forgive me for not being so optimistic.
First, the time constraint. The article claims these things could likely be a reality in 50 or 100 years, citing the discoveries we've made in the past 100 years. But remember that Alan Turing claimed that we'd have AI capable of perfectly imitating a human by the year 2000, and we're nowhere near that. 100 years-- maybe. 50 years? No.
The article also claimed that the only factory jobs would be design and structuring. Tiny little robots would do all the work. Ignoring the problem of power supplies, I remember the words of Frank Herbert's Dune: "Machines didn't free men. They only allowed men with machines to enslave other men."
Or what about "synthesizing food to stop world hunger"? The major cause of famines is not lack of FOOD, but lack of MONEY. When you get right down to it, plant organisms are remarkably efficient at building food, far more efficient than robots building food could be. Enough food exists in the world for everyone to be fat and lazy, but the starving people can't afford to buy it.
Similar rebuttals apply to the rest of the claims. Common sense: 1, Pie in the Sky: 0.
-Ted
I am consistantly amazed at John's integrity every time I read something he's written. It seems like everything he says, he's thought about and has a good reason for it. If he's not sure, he says so. He doesn't walk into problems with a preconceived notion of "the best" solution, as exemplified by his choice of NT as their platform for development.
:) Was it really the six months of real programming that turned him around? I'm curious how exactly he had a change of heart, because I know many many people who just balk whenever someone tries to teach them anything.
:)
But hearing his description of his youth, he clearly wasn't always this ethical.
I guess what I'm asking is, "To what extent is John Carmack's integrity a natural extension of born love for the 'best solution'? To what extent did he learn integrity?"
Incidently, I think that John's ethics are one of the two main reasons he's *universally* beloved by gamers (unlike John Romero). The reason is that Carmack makes really kick ass games.
-Ted
This article has all the ear marks of a crack pot theoretical physicist whom no one listens to.
The author of this article, Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist who lives near Oxford, UK.
First, notice how he's not actually working at any university, but cites that he "lives near Oxford" as if that makes him smarter. He also does NOT state what kind of degree he has and where it's from. (Not that degrees make one smart, but when the rest of the article is suspect, the degree is too.)
Consider this paragraph:
The notion of time as an invisible framework that contains and constrains the Universe is not unlike the crystal spheres invented centuries ago to carry the planets. After the spheres had been shattered by Tycho Brahe's observations, Kepler said: "We must philosophise about these things differently." Much of modern physics stems from this insight. We need a new notion of time.
He's basically saying, "You might think I'm crazy but I'm really as insightful as Kepler! Save yourself the embarassment and support my ideas now!" Of course, Kepler actually came up with real equations, and Kepler's Laws provided meaningful insight into planetary motion. This article's author has not provided anything useful.
Here is the best support he can muster from other physicists:
Americans Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler combined quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of general relativity to produce an equation that describes the whole Universe. Put into the equation a configuration of the Universe, and out comes a probability for that configuration. There is no mention of time. Admittedly, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is controversial and fraught with mathematical difficulties...
Wow, his best cite is contraversial and came up with a useless mathematical equation. He's really just using the idea that for any configuration of the universe, there is a probability that it exists. (But doesn't his article state that all configurations of the universe exist? We just experience them one at a time? Hmmm, sounds like a contradiction...)
The feeling I got from reading this article was that the author wasn't taken seriously by the academic community because his ideas are some subset of: {Trivial, Unprovable, Useless}. If this is an average article for Julian, then I agree with the academics.
-Ted
Here's a brief explanation of the article:
Consider the set of all possible configurations of all particles in the universe. (He names this set Platonia.) Arrange the set so that configurations which are similar are close to each other. In other words, the configuration where I've just gotten out of my chair is close to the configuration where I'm about to get out of my chair, but they're both really far from the configuration where I'm on an airplane flying to Bombay.
He then defines the "arrows" of time as a straight "track" traced between different configurations. Each configuration contains data which has records of "the past"-- other configurations on the same track. Essentially he's changed the definition of the Universe. What we consider "the universe" is a single element of the set he names Platonia. But he names Platonia the universe-- the set of all possible particle configurations.
Let me use his arguments to prove that distance doesn't exist. "Consider what we think of as points on the real line. The point 1 and the point 4 have a distance of three. But there's really an infinite number of points, and they're all connected. I will define the real line R as a point. Distance has no meaning to the real line so distance must not exist! What we think of as distance is really just the separation between two different instantiations of our point R." Technically stated this is true. He's redefining terms in such a way that they're no longer meaningful.
On the bright side, if he could get from "Time doesn't exist" to "consider a set that contains the concept of time", he might be able to theorize something useful.
I'm going to comment on his credentials in a later post...
-Ted
My source of information is a good friend of mine who is a well known registered nutritionist. (For example, she was invited by the Communist Chinese government to visit China and lecture their doctors. Not only was she allowed into Bejing, but she was also asked to visit some hospitals out in the more rural areas.)
The primary cause of Bipolar disorders is extreme stress. The real "catch" is the definition of stress. Extreme stress could mean chemical stress on the body (eg. using narcotics), emotional stress (eg. going through a divorce), time pressures (eg. Prepare a PhD Thesis defense), and so on.
I think she's been looking into ways to increase the body's ability to cope with stress, which can remove the bipolar disorder. In particular, detecting which bio-chemical disorders appear in bipolar patients and whether fixing those disorders reverse the disorder.
-Ted
Actually, all ADHD and ADD cases I've known have been bipolar. There's a lot of evidence that implies these disorders are symptoms of being bipolar.
-Ted
Very few computer games have revolutionized the industry by creating and popularizing new genres. (Wolfenstein 3D, Civilization, Myst/7th Guest, Command and Conquer, and Ultima Online are the only examples I can think of.) Each game genre became possible because of a new piece of hardware that became available (eg. decent video card for Wolfenstein, CD-ROM for Myst and 7th Guest, internet access for Ultima Online). It's clear that today's hardware advances will provide richer 3d games, but will this hardware bring us a new game genre? If so, could you elaborate on what that genre might be and how it differs from previous game concepts?
-Ted
A few months ago I remember you were interested in the problem of computer vision, citing it was "the opposite of computer graphics." Did you ever look into this? If so, did your research have a direct impact on the Q3 artificial intelligence?
In what ways could computer vision research benefeit future computer graphics development?
-Ted
I did some testing and the minimal search string is "More Satan". If you delete either word or try "Satan More", you won't get the same number one hit.
So clearly Google has some mechanism for filtering specific search strings and defining the number one hit (aka. the "I'm feeling lucky" button). Perhaps they will fund themselves by selling out the "I'm feeling lucky" button responses. I'm sure the "Pr0N" search string would sell quickly.
This raises the lesser evil question. Would you rather have banner ads or corrupted searches? Clearly this depends on the scope of the ads (check out this anagram website) and how many search slots they sell (ever use Yahoo?).
-Ted
Methinks such folk should scale back their expectations a bit. After all its only ones and zeros. Tiny little switches on a hunk of silicon. It will be cool, but not immediately world-changing.
I'm sure we all know that ideas are some of the most valuable commodities in the world-- why else would the slashdot community care so much about privacy? But ideas don't do anything on their own until you have some hardware to prove the idea. Do you really want someone else to take your idea before you prove it empyrically?
The only project that compares in secrecy is the Manhattan Project, and that definatly changed the world. But more importantly, it changed the way we thought.
The Manhattan Project's idea was, "Atoms can be split and produce a lot of energy." What if Transmetta has another very simple yet profound idea? "It's only ones and zeros"? Maybe it's NOT ones and zeros any more. And therein lies the reason for secrecy.
There are two reasons for extreme secrecy. Either you really do have something important to hide (think Manhattan Project) or you want to drum up interest (think GeForce 256). But if you're just drumming up interest, you need to let a few crumbs slip. Transmetta's air-tight secrecy is not worth its cost of implementation if they're not actually hiding anything worthwhile.
In short, I think they're really onto something. It will probably change the way we think about Silicon, ones and zeros, and so on.
-Ted
All Solow's Paradox proves is that the real bottleneck in labor is the human mind, not rote labor. Before there were calculators, people had to add 12 + 132 in their heads before they came up with 144. Now people need to find the buttons 1, 2, 3, + and = on a calculator. The calculator is doing the routine labor, but the amount of time it takes to get the answer is the same.
In other words, people are spending less effort due to computers, but aren't more efficient. Effort relates to rote "assembly line" labor. Efficiency comes from the human mind, and computers haven't made any improvements on the mind last time I checked. Hence productivity remains constant, even before the BSOD existed.
-Ted
Everything in this world is explainable, you just don't have all the information. (Except for that new Coke flavor thing they created awhile back...why did they do that ? :-)
Well... The best theory I heard was this. The expensive part of soda is the syrup, not the sugared, carbonated water. If you've had older sodas, you'll notice that there is a much higher syrup to water ratio. Coke and Pepsi have been slowly decreasing the syrup to water ratio over decades to lower costs. New Coke was an attempt to speed up the process. They spent a lot of money on a marketting campagne to convince people that they liked a lower syrup to water ratio. But when people compared Old Coke with New Coke, it was clear that more syrup just tasted better.
A lot like Micros~1 spending lots of money convincing people that they like Windows 2000 a lot more than whatever else they had, but when you've tried Linux, you know what a real operating system runs like.
-Ted
Actually, Iridium failed purely because of bad business logistics. Iridium provides a way of using one cell phone anywhere in the world, regardless of whether or not you're near a cell base station. However, there has been such a boom in the cellular service industry that even many third world countries have cell base stations. Iridium didn't provide a market demanded service. It's sort of nice that you can connect through a satellite, but certainly not necessary-- or cost effective. I heard the first Iridium phones sold for $3000.
If Iridium had launched five years ago, maybe the technology need would have been there, but the cost would have been even more prohibitive. Iridium is living proof that hype doesn't pay the bills.
Incidently, they had 20,000 subscribers, and needed 1,000,000 to break even.
-Ted