Well, yes but that leaves a huge chunk of population of both US and Canada in the cold. My city (650 thousand people) has no network capable of supporting the N900. In fact there is no such network within a 1000km radius of here.
Well, in many areas of the US and Canada CDMA is/was the only game in town. The reverse however is not true, I am not aware of any places where GSM coverage exists but no CDMA, even now.
This is why terms like "dominant" are often used in reference to CDMA (although of course things are changing, iPhone being a major catalyst in the awareness/adoption of GSM).
How so? Go look at T-Mobile high-speed data coverage map and compare with AT&T high-speed data coverage map. The N900 works only on T-Mobile and no other network in the US.
Well, the end result was that CDMA ended-up with most of its users having non-portable, locked-down phones that you cannot unlock even if you paid someone (like you can with GSM phones). Add to this the fact that most of the world uses GSM and so most of the phones on the market are GSM and I see this as a losing battle in the long run for CDMA, technical superiority notwithstanding.
The local CDMA telcos here all are desperately grafting pieces of 3G technology onto their CDMA towers and I think the writing is pretty much on the wall..
You shoot down your own arguments. First, no one is talking about Bum Fuck, Montana. We are talking many state and provincial capitals where the population is centered. Zero 3G coverage for N900 exists there. Secondly you conveniently point out that a network does exist that covers them and iPhone is using it. N900 cannot and will not. In short, Nokia chose not to give a shit about most of North America and just because the N900 works (sort of) in downtown Manhattan does not in any way invalidate this fact.
My point stands. The phone is useless for high speed data in most of North America where other phones (like iPhone) do work.
First you complain about a device that has a limited marketplace, and then you start listing South Dakota and Montana?
You mean those are desolate wastelands where no cities exist, right? Nuclear winter-land? Or are they populated by the "lesser people", unlike first-rate citizens of say, New York?
But it is one thing to complain about the N900's real shortcomings and another to be angry about a European phone supporting all the European networks and only some of the US.
The "anger" comes from the repeated, unthinking "recommendations" of the N900 for problems with North American carriers or phones. Like in this very Slashdot article.
Also, Nokia fans have promoted the phone extensively on Slashdot before it became apparent that it was not designed for North America (and thus a significant portion of Slashdot audience).
By "recent development" I meant "in North America". The respective histories of the standards themselves have little practical impact on what people can use here...
As to the reasons of why CDMA over GSM? Who really knows? I've heard all sorts of stories, ranging from US government ties with Qualcomm all the way to unwillingness of carriers to allow SIM-card like technology because they hate consumer freedom (and GSM being "allowed" only after locked phones became the norm here) etc.
This is a hardware problem actually. Nokia simply did not bother including all the frequencies in its 3G radio circuitry (but they did for the 2G radio - go figure).
So no amount of software, open or otherwise, will solve this.
Right. Ok, try Winnipeg Canada. Provincial capital. Exactly 0 (that is zero) networks with 3G capabilities for the N900. Anywhere in Manitoba? Saskatoon? Nova Scotia? Newfoundland?
In the US, try anywhere in South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska etc. Zero 3G coverage.
I could go on and on with a chorus of Nokia fanboys whining denials in the background.
Yet all it would take is to add the AT&T/Rogers 3G bands and presto! Most of the US and Canada covered.
Keep in mind that in the US and in Canada the dominant cellular system for many decades was CDMA. GSM is a fairly recent development and it makes inroads slowly. Also the "standard" GSM frequencies were already allocated to other things and so it took a long while for networks with frequencies similar to those in Europe to emerge. Then add the vast geographical areas to the equation and you can see why the GSM coverage is absolutely lousy.
Essentially any company that wants a phone that works in North America must add the extra "North America" frequencies to its sets or else you won't get any performance (or in some cases even a connection).
Don't get confused by all these uncritical Nokia fanboys who seem to react violently to any news of Nokia being somewhat short of sainthood. In the US it is only T-Mobile (in some cities) that supports it and in Canada only WIND (which is really tiny and uses Rogers for coverage outside downtown areas of Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver - and N900 3G does not work on the Rogers network).
Everywhere you will only get the EDGE GSM speeds, not 3G.
Wikipedia is wrong. In Canada only the WIND network is capable of these frequencies, which covers about 3 downtown areas in the country. The only national GSM carrier (Rogers) has different frequencies.
Same for the US where only AT&T has the right frequencies. And so on with the rest of the world.
Uncritical fanboys seem in force today. In the US the only network that is capable of supporting the N900 is the AT&T, which does not work in many areas - which I mentioned. In Canada its even worse, only WIND supports it (which works only in the very downtown areas of about 3 cities).
So no, it does not work in North America, as its use is near impossible in Canada and requires changing your address in many places in the US. A "working" phone is usable wherever high-speed data cellular coverage exists.
N900 is useless in most of the world because Nokia decided that the 3G functionality only needs support for two European bands and not for any other frequencies. Only the baseline GSM (which means EDGE data rates if you are lucky) works outside of Europe.
Everyone else, which means most people in North America (only one GSM network with questionable coverage in the USA and one covering literally just the downtown areas of three major cities in Canada are capable of supporting it there) is out of luck.
So could you please stop recommending the N900 as if it was some kind of universal cure for this problem as it is a device that cannot be properly used on a majority of networks.
For the thousandth time, N900 is not a good piece of hardware because its crippled radio works only on a few European networks and its useless anywhere else in the world where the frequencies are different. Only its slow-poke EDGE-capable GSM baseline radio is "quad-band". The 3G functionality only supports two European bands.
So for a vast majority of people in North America (and many other places outside of EU) the device is pretty much worthless.
Frankly I cannot fathom why Nokia purposefully made sure to restrict the marketplace for this phone which would otherwise be far greater, judging from all the global interest.
A 2D DLP grid is not a raster - it's a grid. It's pixels, but not raster. You're confused.
While technically true, the DLPs are used pretty much exclusively to display input signal meant for a traditional CRT tube, which hasn't changed for decades due to mostly technological inertia. Thus they are classified as "raster" display systems because they accept input formatted and optimized for a raster display. The same is applicable to LCD monitors and TVs which are also technically "grid" displays, yet their raster-optimized inputs put them into a "raster" category. Even more up-to date DVI input schemes follow the "raster" (i.e. scan-line) formatting.
You would be correct only if the DLP chip was directly driven by the host system's CPU and its pixels were addressed directly, without going via raster scan encode/decode stages first.
I'm talking about a DLP TV's projection chamber being suitable for a laser vector display. Which, as I said several times, is something I think could be further developed, which makes whether or not DLPs are increasingly or decreasingly popular now irrelevant. But indeed DLPs are still made and sold. You're confused.
The rear-projection TV systems are universally considered inferior to direct display systems by pretty much all consumers, that is why they were just a stop-gap measure kludge which was quickly abandoned as soon as direct display systems became large enough. Trying to bring back a cumbersome assembly of mirrors and translucent screens under the pretense of improving "quality" is just plain ridiculous given the fact that they had a very long list of problems related to light refraction, viewing angles, ambient light etc and on and on and on, not to mention minimum size requirements due to the optical pathways needed (you can't cheat physics).
What killed vector displays was that they weren't the same tech as the vastly larger TV market, so they didn't achieve economy of scale. As has been noted many times, for their specific application they offered superior rendering compared to raster displays, but their economics weren't as good
You gotta be kidding.
Ok, since you are starting to sound positively pig-headed, let me illustrate how utterly inadequate vector graphics displays are: just render this very Slashdot page using a "vector graphics" display! It can't work without abandoning all of its supposed "advantages"! In order to render a black text on a white background page, you would need to paint the background in form of vectors leaving the text area as unpainted, which would immediately require a raster-like scan to fill the solid areas. Which comprise 90+% of the screen surface. There is a reason why the only application of "vector graphics" displays were in games like "Asteroids" or "Tempest" or radar displays where there was no background. As soon as you have a solid color area, a picture or a texture of any kind, your "vector" system deteriorates into "vectors" as small as 1-pixel, thus becoming a bit-map display which is most efficiently rendered as a raster scan. And that is something like 95+% of all commonly used display contents on modern computer systems. Only the "cool kid" pitch-black background web pages would be suitable for your "quality" vector graphics display!
All your musings about SVG are laughable as nearly all SVG contents is rendered on top of some kind of background, which a raster or a grid type display is far superior at rendering.
If vector graphics displays "won" we would be living in some kind of bizarro-world Tron-redux where all our displays would exclusively show line art contents (and flickering contents at that).
The continuing advance of technologies that could make better vector displays, and the superiority of vector displays for some applications, with the arrival of vector graphics formats that vector displays would suit, shows
... DLP TVs have a pretty big chamber, even when they're flat.
You Sir are confused. DLP technology is a raster display technology, where a grid of mirrors etched onto a semi-conductor chip and controlled electronically represents the entire pixel grid. Also, the advances in the size of the LCD displays rendered even it obsolete for TV use. Most stores no longer carry projection TVs of any kind.
Now we package it all on a single cheap chip for "picoprojectors" for mobile devices and other laser video projectors. They raster the beam with a single horizontal scanning mirror against a deformed crystal to step vertically into a stack of lines, but two mirrors could be used.
As to picoprojectors, they have the exact same problem as the old CRT tubes: the only way to guarantee consistent quality of the display is to represent the image as fixed scan frequency raster, which is what all of the ones produced so far do exactly. Any attempt to deflect the beam in a vector graphics display style immediately brings back all the unsolved (and likely unsolvable) problems of that approach.
And again, since so much image data is now vector, a vector display could be even higher quality than a pixel display for that data.
Again, no. A vast majority of all display data in computers is raster with vector graphics constituting specialized exceptions. As to "quality" I already explained that vector graphics displays have a fatal flaw which reduces their quality rapidly with the number of vectors displayed, a problem which holds true irrespective of the beam technology used. Just like the degradation occurred in CRT tubes, so it does in laser displays. Worse in fact since laser-based displays have no after-effect glow which the old CRT tubes had with their phosphorus "smoothing" the flicker of the display.
Vector graphics technology has only a very small niche of applications and its drawbacks are fatal for any general-purpose displays. That is why it was abandoned for general purpose applications and it is not coming back, no matter how elaborate the pipe dreams that visit you.
Vector graphics displays are essentially unworkable and that is why they were abandoned.
Amongst their many drawbacks is a true killer: they require a CRT tube, complete with an electron beam that can be deflected in arbitrary directions. They are utterly incompatible with any other modern display technology such as LCD displays for example (if you want to use vector graphics on an LCD you have to rasterize your vectors first - which neatly defeats the whole idea).
Then there is a of course the problem with variable brightness, where vector graphics displays lose brightness when new vectors are added, to the point that when enough vectors are drawn the display becomes too dim for viewing. And then there is the deteriorating update frequency (which is behind the brightness problem) which causes increased flicker with an increase of the number of vectors displayed... and on and on and on.
The only last holdout for vector graphics displays is in some large scale party/concert laser shows where a single beam is deflected via galvanometer and mirror setups and where only carefully pre-selected for a given brightness/flicker ratios sets of images are drawn.
The trouble is of course that while you are right about government thuggery, if absent it is quickly replaced by wealth-based thuggery. There is no escape.
All you get is to chose who the thugs will be: hereditary dynasties descended from wealthiest people (a.k.a. nobility) or somewhat-controllable (at least in theory) by the citizenry government pencil-pushers. Or a combination of these.
There appears to be no other choices. All the libertarian utopias so far proposed have the common characteristics of being totally unstable and defenseless against self-accelerating accumulation of wealth and power and thus would rapidly devolve into various forms of feudalism if left to their own devices. In fact this is exactly what happened to all early human societies which had a much more socially flat structures and whose lack of central governance resembled closely the libertarian ethos.
The root cause of the problem is of course the one plaguing humanity since times immemorial: the nastiest, greediest and most sociopathic individuals (or their progeny) seem to always raise into positions of power no matter what social or political system is in place. In some systems it takes them a little longer then in others, but the end results are the same. And the major accelerant is the size of the society in question, in a small group the power of the sociopaths is naturally limited by their ability to enforce their wishes, that limit is rapidly diminished as the size of the group grows, to the point that on a national (in case of governments) or pan-national (in case of mega-businesses) scale pretty much any atrocity can be committed with impunity.
Have you ever been in any form of armed services? What about been in an excessively stressful situation, even after the best training, where you and your friends could lose your life at any
moment?
You mean the soldiers of the Waffen SS or the Imperial Japanese Army should not have been prosecuted because, you know, they used exactly the same excuse (in addition to others, like "I was just following orders")?
Foregoing the whole problem of the Apache crew in question being in the exact same position as that of a Luftwaffe bomber over some Warsaw kindergarten, we still have their wretched behaviour on tape to damn them.
So, anytime anyone from your country kills anything or anyone, can we hold you and all your countrymen responsible for it, especially murder? I probably wasted my time typing this out as you seem like the type of zealot that would reject anyone else's thoughts but can't understand why no one will ever take you seriously, but what the hell.
It depends on the legitimacy of the warfare they are in. Soldiers have a default moral high-ground only when they are the defending side in wars of unprovoked aggression. No one sane would accuse members of the Polish or the French Resistance of being murderers even though their methods were little different from those of today's "insurgents", i.e. hit-and-run, IEDs, executions of collaborators etc and which also resulted in many casualties of innocent bystanders.
That is because they were the defenders of their homelands while the Axis troops were the invaders.
This is partially also why many of the Allied commanders did not end up in Nuremberg themselves, even though they've committed atrocities and bona-fide war crimes in the course of their "liberation" campaigns (the other part is of course in Hitler's old canard that "the victors write history").
To sum it up, no moral ambiguities whatsoever exist when armies are used for the purpose for which they claim to exist, i.e. defense of national territory against invaders. All the problems start as the mentality of a nation expands beyond mere defense and its rulers start dreaming the vile dreams of an Empire.
We never should have gone into Iraq in the first place, but we're there now, and have been for some time. It's now a question of how to make the best of it.
The obvious truth, and it is something the war-hawks loathe to hear and accept, is that the USA (and its allies) have no legitimate say in what happens. All you do by attempting to force your views down upon the locals and failing that desperately tying to prolong your presence in vain hopes of somehow postponing the moment of truth is to make your position even more untenable.
It was always up to the locals to solve their problems and it will still end up being so in the long run.
I think that invading them was the worst possible move because doing so de-legitimized all those embryonic local pro-democracy, pro-Western forces which tried to grow slowly in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are now seen as puppets and collaborators of the invaders and thoroughly outclassed by the newly ascent religious wackos.
As I said earlier, the main reason massive public works projects aren't successful in Iraq and Afghanistan is because they keep getting blown up! The reason military projects are a success is because they are being built in areas too heavily fortified to be the target of attacks.
Actually, that is not true. A good indicator of the state of affairs is that of the projects claimed to be completed (as in not-blown-up) only a small percentage was actually accepted by the Iraqis and the rest simply abandoned after they had been "handed over" as they were unasked for, had been built to specifications that served only their builders, were shoddily constructed and unusable etc. Iraqis were not even consulted during the decision making process of the majority of the projects, particularly those started during the reign of the "Vice-Roy" Bremer.
Nevertheless, Towards the beginning of the war (occupation? Whatever you want to call it) we were bending over backwards to accommodate religious and cultural concerns. No porn, alcohol, etc. Most people dealing directly with the locals got language classes (we weren't required to become fluent, but there was additional pay if you did), proselytizing was forbidden, etc.
Well, it was the official policy (which was not very well adhered to outside of the field of view of embedded journos' cameras) which was also immediately undermined by all the mercenaries which came for the ride along with the main US forces and who did not have any such constraints at all. Furthermore the gap was just too huge. It is like getting Britons back to Jerusalem five years after they sacked it in the Crusades and putting on the "hearts and minds" campaign complete with smileys on their shields. The US has simply too much of a recent history of utter hypocrisy such as one-sided support of Israel and some nasty Arab dictators when it suited it, to overcome. And that is not even counting the obvious effect of the whole "shock and awe" thing, which indeed left a lasting impression, although not the kind the planners were hoping for.
Overall though, there are plenty of Muslims who peacefully coexist with the west, and religious warfare is an excuse people use to convince the fanatics to throw their lives away.
Religious warfare is stupid by definition, but that does not change the fact that it existed for as long as there is religion. And so seriously bad blood gets in the way of pretty much everything, but it is probably at its peak between the Muslims and the Christians/Jews. Pretending that it is otherwise is yet another aspect of wishful thinking that doomed the Iraq and Afghanistan "nation building" exercises to be such failures.
Who cars if it was authorized or not in this context.
Yea, "who cares!?". A typical attitude of a US jingoist. I assure you that families of those you've blown up do care. Rather deeply in fact, to the point of taking up the ever-popular hobby of IED construction.
Those people acted accordingly and appropriately no matter how much you want to close your eyes and ignore the fact that they were in a war.
Yes "appropriately", particularly the part where they laugh about kids they've blown up because "How does the brat dare to live in this country where we choose to have our fun little war?! And then show up in our gun sights! What nerve!". Apparently "we blow up whatever the fuck we like wherever the fuck we like" is the "appropriate" behaviour of US troops in a self-fucking-declared war-zone (without actually bothering to declare war in an attempt to "have the cake and eat it too"). No surprise there.
I suggest you look up and study "sovereign authority", sovereignty, and perhaps you should try to explain why you somehow have it and why the US somehow does not. And while you are at it, stop using bad analogies that couldn't be further from the truth and perhaps you wouldn't appear to be suck a jackwad to everyone.
Bullshit. If the US does not respect basic rules of international behaviour, which it clearly demonstrated, it also stands to reason that these rules do not apply to its opponents. In fact the US legal "luminaries" do claim exactly this, that the "rules do not apply" in their pursuit of "terrists". Polite rules like "sovereign authority". So by being pig-headed and trying to bully your way over everyone else you ended up legitimizing entities like Al-Queda. Congratulations. I am sure Osama will send you a "thank you" note any day now. For this and all the recruitment to his cause you've managed to drum up.
Umm... Yea. When a country does something, it's an act of war, when you do it, it's just a douche bag who hasn't mastered the mental capability to understand the topic he is speaking about. When countries can't come together and work things out rationally, they go to war. When you get pissed and start killing people, you are a murderer. And yes, there is a difference, A difference as big as you killing someone doing nothing but standing there and you killing someone trying to kill yourself.
The difference has always been that of law. That is right, laws govern both nations and individuals. But once a nation abandons any pretense of following law and if that law ceases to have any possibility of being enforced internationally because the super-power nation in question threatens violence otherwise, so does the law cease to apply to other nations and individuals and the place becomes a lawless jungle. This is what the US has accomplished in both Iraq and Afghanistan. At this point in time, due to utter disdain the US has displayed for both international law and even its own Constitution it became quite possible to argue that Al Queda is justified in attacking targets within US territory. Again, congratulations on fucking up the only leg you had to stand on and reducing the whole thing to "we are the biggest fucking thugs on the block and so you better give us your money or we will break your kid's neck!" lever of "authority".
If you do not know what that difference is, or how it applies, then I suggest you go back to your teachers tomorrow when high school is back in and ask them about it.
Keep displaying total lack of basic comprehension while trying to suggest that your opponents are immature and then your stupidity will truly shine so brilliantly that Slashdot readers will need sunglasses to read your posts.
Oh I see now. It's just another reason to bash America. Listen, no one said the US can do no wrong, what was said if that these people didn't do
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes but that leaves a huge chunk of population of both US and Canada in the cold. My city (650 thousand people) has no network capable of supporting the N900. In fact there is no such network within a 1000km radius of here.
Well, in many areas of the US and Canada CDMA is/was the only game in town. The reverse however is not true, I am not aware of any places where GSM coverage exists but no CDMA, even now.
This is why terms like "dominant" are often used in reference to CDMA (although of course things are changing, iPhone being a major catalyst in the awareness/adoption of GSM).
How so? Go look at T-Mobile high-speed data coverage map and compare with AT&T high-speed data coverage map. The N900 works only on T-Mobile and no other network in the US.
Well, the end result was that CDMA ended-up with most of its users having non-portable, locked-down phones that you cannot unlock even if you paid someone (like you can with GSM phones). Add to this the fact that most of the world uses GSM and so most of the phones on the market are GSM and I see this as a losing battle in the long run for CDMA, technical superiority notwithstanding.
The local CDMA telcos here all are desperately grafting pieces of 3G technology onto their CDMA towers and I think the writing is pretty much on the wall..
You shoot down your own arguments. First, no one is talking about Bum Fuck, Montana. We are talking many state and provincial capitals where the population is centered. Zero 3G coverage for N900 exists there. Secondly you conveniently point out that a network does exist that covers them and iPhone is using it. N900 cannot and will not. In short, Nokia chose not to give a shit about most of North America and just because the N900 works (sort of) in downtown Manhattan does not in any way invalidate this fact.
My point stands. The phone is useless for high speed data in most of North America where other phones (like iPhone) do work.
I already corrected myself immediately after posting. If you had bothered to read the thread before spouting...
You mean those are desolate wastelands where no cities exist, right? Nuclear winter-land? Or are they populated by the "lesser people", unlike first-rate citizens of say, New York?
The "anger" comes from the repeated, unthinking "recommendations" of the N900 for problems with North American carriers or phones. Like in this very Slashdot article.
Also, Nokia fans have promoted the phone extensively on Slashdot before it became apparent that it was not designed for North America (and thus a significant portion of Slashdot audience).
By "recent development" I meant "in North America". The respective histories of the standards themselves have little practical impact on what people can use here...
As to the reasons of why CDMA over GSM? Who really knows? I've heard all sorts of stories, ranging from US government ties with Qualcomm all the way to unwillingness of carriers to allow SIM-card like technology because they hate consumer freedom (and GSM being "allowed" only after locked phones became the norm here) etc.
This is a hardware problem actually. Nokia simply did not bother including all the frequencies in its 3G radio circuitry (but they did for the 2G radio - go figure).
So no amount of software, open or otherwise, will solve this.
Right. Ok, try Winnipeg Canada. Provincial capital. Exactly 0 (that is zero) networks with 3G capabilities for the N900. Anywhere in Manitoba? Saskatoon? Nova Scotia? Newfoundland?
In the US, try anywhere in South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska etc. Zero 3G coverage.
I could go on and on with a chorus of Nokia fanboys whining denials in the background.
Yet all it would take is to add the AT&T/Rogers 3G bands and presto! Most of the US and Canada covered.
Keep in mind that in the US and in Canada the dominant cellular system for many decades was CDMA. GSM is a fairly recent development and it makes inroads slowly. Also the "standard" GSM frequencies were already allocated to other things and so it took a long while for networks with frequencies similar to those in Europe to emerge. Then add the vast geographical areas to the equation and you can see why the GSM coverage is absolutely lousy.
Essentially any company that wants a phone that works in North America must add the extra "North America" frequencies to its sets or else you won't get any performance (or in some cases even a connection).
It is true.
Don't get confused by all these uncritical Nokia fanboys who seem to react violently to any news of Nokia being somewhat short of sainthood. In the US it is only T-Mobile (in some cities) that supports it and in Canada only WIND (which is really tiny and uses Rogers for coverage outside downtown areas of Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver - and N900 3G does not work on the Rogers network).
Everywhere you will only get the EDGE GSM speeds, not 3G.
Err, replace AT&T with T-Mobile in my previous post. AT&T does not support it. T-Mobile is a network with much smaller coverage yet.
Reality seems to disagree with some Nokia fanboys, but so it is.
Sorry it is T-Mobile (even lousier then AT&T) that is the only US carrier capable of supporting the N900. AT&T has different frequencies yet.
Wikipedia is wrong. In Canada only the WIND network is capable of these frequencies, which covers about 3 downtown areas in the country. The only national GSM carrier (Rogers) has different frequencies. Same for the US where only AT&T has the right frequencies. And so on with the rest of the world.
Uncritical fanboys seem in force today. In the US the only network that is capable of supporting the N900 is the AT&T, which does not work in many areas - which I mentioned. In Canada its even worse, only WIND supports it (which works only in the very downtown areas of about 3 cities).
So no, it does not work in North America, as its use is near impossible in Canada and requires changing your address in many places in the US. A "working" phone is usable wherever high-speed data cellular coverage exists.
N900 is useless in most of the world because Nokia decided that the 3G functionality only needs support for two European bands and not for any other frequencies. Only the baseline GSM (which means EDGE data rates if you are lucky) works outside of Europe.
Everyone else, which means most people in North America (only one GSM network with questionable coverage in the USA and one covering literally just the downtown areas of three major cities in Canada are capable of supporting it there) is out of luck.
So could you please stop recommending the N900 as if it was some kind of universal cure for this problem as it is a device that cannot be properly used on a majority of networks.
For the thousandth time, N900 is not a good piece of hardware because its crippled radio works only on a few European networks and its useless anywhere else in the world where the frequencies are different. Only its slow-poke EDGE-capable GSM baseline radio is "quad-band". The 3G functionality only supports two European bands.
So for a vast majority of people in North America (and many other places outside of EU) the device is pretty much worthless.
Frankly I cannot fathom why Nokia purposefully made sure to restrict the marketplace for this phone which would otherwise be far greater, judging from all the global interest.
While technically true, the DLPs are used pretty much exclusively to display input signal meant for a traditional CRT tube, which hasn't changed for decades due to mostly technological inertia. Thus they are classified as "raster" display systems because they accept input formatted and optimized for a raster display. The same is applicable to LCD monitors and TVs which are also technically "grid" displays, yet their raster-optimized inputs put them into a "raster" category. Even more up-to date DVI input schemes follow the "raster" (i.e. scan-line) formatting.
You would be correct only if the DLP chip was directly driven by the host system's CPU and its pixels were addressed directly, without going via raster scan encode/decode stages first.
The rear-projection TV systems are universally considered inferior to direct display systems by pretty much all consumers, that is why they were just a stop-gap measure kludge which was quickly abandoned as soon as direct display systems became large enough. Trying to bring back a cumbersome assembly of mirrors and translucent screens under the pretense of improving "quality" is just plain ridiculous given the fact that they had a very long list of problems related to light refraction, viewing angles, ambient light etc and on and on and on, not to mention minimum size requirements due to the optical pathways needed (you can't cheat physics).
You gotta be kidding.
Ok, since you are starting to sound positively pig-headed, let me illustrate how utterly inadequate vector graphics displays are: just render this very Slashdot page using a "vector graphics" display! It can't work without abandoning all of its supposed "advantages"! In order to render a black text on a white background page, you would need to paint the background in form of vectors leaving the text area as unpainted, which would immediately require a raster-like scan to fill the solid areas. Which comprise 90+% of the screen surface. There is a reason why the only application of "vector graphics" displays were in games like "Asteroids" or "Tempest" or radar displays where there was no background. As soon as you have a solid color area, a picture or a texture of any kind, your "vector" system deteriorates into "vectors" as small as 1-pixel, thus becoming a bit-map display which is most efficiently rendered as a raster scan. And that is something like 95+% of all commonly used display contents on modern computer systems. Only the "cool kid" pitch-black background web pages would be suitable for your "quality" vector graphics display!
All your musings about SVG are laughable as nearly all SVG contents is rendered on top of some kind of background, which a raster or a grid type display is far superior at rendering.
If vector graphics displays "won" we would be living in some kind of bizarro-world Tron-redux where all our displays would exclusively show line art contents (and flickering contents at that).
You Sir are confused. DLP technology is a raster display technology, where a grid of mirrors etched onto a semi-conductor chip and controlled electronically represents the entire pixel grid. Also, the advances in the size of the LCD displays rendered even it obsolete for TV use. Most stores no longer carry projection TVs of any kind.
As to picoprojectors, they have the exact same problem as the old CRT tubes: the only way to guarantee consistent quality of the display is to represent the image as fixed scan frequency raster, which is what all of the ones produced so far do exactly. Any attempt to deflect the beam in a vector graphics display style immediately brings back all the unsolved (and likely unsolvable) problems of that approach.
Again, no. A vast majority of all display data in computers is raster with vector graphics constituting specialized exceptions. As to "quality" I already explained that vector graphics displays have a fatal flaw which reduces their quality rapidly with the number of vectors displayed, a problem which holds true irrespective of the beam technology used. Just like the degradation occurred in CRT tubes, so it does in laser displays. Worse in fact since laser-based displays have no after-effect glow which the old CRT tubes had with their phosphorus "smoothing" the flicker of the display.
Vector graphics technology has only a very small niche of applications and its drawbacks are fatal for any general-purpose displays. That is why it was abandoned for general purpose applications and it is not coming back, no matter how elaborate the pipe dreams that visit you.
Vector graphics displays are essentially unworkable and that is why they were abandoned.
Amongst their many drawbacks is a true killer: they require a CRT tube, complete with an electron beam that can be deflected in arbitrary directions. They are utterly incompatible with any other modern display technology such as LCD displays for example (if you want to use vector graphics on an LCD you have to rasterize your vectors first - which neatly defeats the whole idea).
Then there is a of course the problem with variable brightness, where vector graphics displays lose brightness when new vectors are added, to the point that when enough vectors are drawn the display becomes too dim for viewing. And then there is the deteriorating update frequency (which is behind the brightness problem) which causes increased flicker with an increase of the number of vectors displayed... and on and on and on.
The only last holdout for vector graphics displays is in some large scale party/concert laser shows where a single beam is deflected via galvanometer and mirror setups and where only carefully pre-selected for a given brightness/flicker ratios sets of images are drawn.
The trouble is of course that while you are right about government thuggery, if absent it is quickly replaced by wealth-based thuggery. There is no escape.
All you get is to chose who the thugs will be: hereditary dynasties descended from wealthiest people (a.k.a. nobility) or somewhat-controllable (at least in theory) by the citizenry government pencil-pushers. Or a combination of these.
There appears to be no other choices. All the libertarian utopias so far proposed have the common characteristics of being totally unstable and defenseless against self-accelerating accumulation of wealth and power and thus would rapidly devolve into various forms of feudalism if left to their own devices. In fact this is exactly what happened to all early human societies which had a much more socially flat structures and whose lack of central governance resembled closely the libertarian ethos.
The root cause of the problem is of course the one plaguing humanity since times immemorial: the nastiest, greediest and most sociopathic individuals (or their progeny) seem to always raise into positions of power no matter what social or political system is in place. In some systems it takes them a little longer then in others, but the end results are the same. And the major accelerant is the size of the society in question, in a small group the power of the sociopaths is naturally limited by their ability to enforce their wishes, that limit is rapidly diminished as the size of the group grows, to the point that on a national (in case of governments) or pan-national (in case of mega-businesses) scale pretty much any atrocity can be committed with impunity.
You mean the soldiers of the Waffen SS or the Imperial Japanese Army should not have been prosecuted because, you know, they used exactly the same excuse (in addition to others, like "I was just following orders")?
Foregoing the whole problem of the Apache crew in question being in the exact same position as that of a Luftwaffe bomber over some Warsaw kindergarten, we still have their wretched behaviour on tape to damn them.
It depends on the legitimacy of the warfare they are in. Soldiers have a default moral high-ground only when they are the defending side in wars of unprovoked aggression. No one sane would accuse members of the Polish or the French Resistance of being murderers even though their methods were little different from those of today's "insurgents", i.e. hit-and-run, IEDs, executions of collaborators etc and which also resulted in many casualties of innocent bystanders.
That is because they were the defenders of their homelands while the Axis troops were the invaders.
This is partially also why many of the Allied commanders did not end up in Nuremberg themselves, even though they've committed atrocities and bona-fide war crimes in the course of their "liberation" campaigns (the other part is of course in Hitler's old canard that "the victors write history").
To sum it up, no moral ambiguities whatsoever exist when armies are used for the purpose for which they claim to exist, i.e. defense of national territory against invaders. All the problems start as the mentality of a nation expands beyond mere defense and its rulers start dreaming the vile dreams of an Empire.
The obvious truth, and it is something the war-hawks loathe to hear and accept, is that the USA (and its allies) have no legitimate say in what happens. All you do by attempting to force your views down upon the locals and failing that desperately tying to prolong your presence in vain hopes of somehow postponing the moment of truth is to make your position even more untenable.
It was always up to the locals to solve their problems and it will still end up being so in the long run.
I think that invading them was the worst possible move because doing so de-legitimized all those embryonic local pro-democracy, pro-Western forces which tried to grow slowly in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are now seen as puppets and collaborators of the invaders and thoroughly outclassed by the newly ascent religious wackos.
Actually, that is not true. A good indicator of the state of affairs is that of the projects claimed to be completed (as in not-blown-up) only a small percentage was actually accepted by the Iraqis and the rest simply abandoned after they had been "handed over" as they were unasked for, had been built to specifications that served only their builders, were shoddily constructed and unusable etc. Iraqis were not even consulted during the decision making process of the majority of the projects, particularly those started during the reign of the "Vice-Roy" Bremer.
Well, it was the official policy (which was not very well adhered to outside of the field of view of embedded journos' cameras) which was also immediately undermined by all the mercenaries which came for the ride along with the main US forces and who did not have any such constraints at all. Furthermore the gap was just too huge. It is like getting Britons back to Jerusalem five years after they sacked it in the Crusades and putting on the "hearts and minds" campaign complete with smileys on their shields. The US has simply too much of a recent history of utter hypocrisy such as one-sided support of Israel and some nasty Arab dictators when it suited it, to overcome. And that is not even counting the obvious effect of the whole "shock and awe" thing, which indeed left a lasting impression, although not the kind the planners were hoping for.
Religious warfare is stupid by definition, but that does not change the fact that it existed for as long as there is religion. And so seriously bad blood gets in the way of pretty much everything, but it is probably at its peak between the Muslims and the Christians/Jews. Pretending that it is otherwise is yet another aspect of wishful thinking that doomed the Iraq and Afghanistan "nation building" exercises to be such failures.
Yea, "who cares!?". A typical attitude of a US jingoist. I assure you that families of those you've blown up do care. Rather deeply in fact, to the point of taking up the ever-popular hobby of IED construction.
Yes "appropriately", particularly the part where they laugh about kids they've blown up because "How does the brat dare to live in this country where we choose to have our fun little war?! And then show up in our gun sights! What nerve!". Apparently "we blow up whatever the fuck we like wherever the fuck we like" is the "appropriate" behaviour of US troops in a self-fucking-declared war-zone (without actually bothering to declare war in an attempt to "have the cake and eat it too"). No surprise there.
Bullshit. If the US does not respect basic rules of international behaviour, which it clearly demonstrated, it also stands to reason that these rules do not apply to its opponents. In fact the US legal "luminaries" do claim exactly this, that the "rules do not apply" in their pursuit of "terrists". Polite rules like "sovereign authority". So by being pig-headed and trying to bully your way over everyone else you ended up legitimizing entities like Al-Queda. Congratulations. I am sure Osama will send you a "thank you" note any day now. For this and all the recruitment to his cause you've managed to drum up.
The difference has always been that of law. That is right, laws govern both nations and individuals. But once a nation abandons any pretense of following law and if that law ceases to have any possibility of being enforced internationally because the super-power nation in question threatens violence otherwise, so does the law cease to apply to other nations and individuals and the place becomes a lawless jungle. This is what the US has accomplished in both Iraq and Afghanistan. At this point in time, due to utter disdain the US has displayed for both international law and even its own Constitution it became quite possible to argue that Al Queda is justified in attacking targets within US territory. Again, congratulations on fucking up the only leg you had to stand on and reducing the whole thing to "we are the biggest fucking thugs on the block and so you better give us your money or we will break your kid's neck!" lever of "authority".
Keep displaying total lack of basic comprehension while trying to suggest that your opponents are immature and then your stupidity will truly shine so brilliantly that Slashdot readers will need sunglasses to read your posts.