What was 900MHz allocated to in the US anyways? stupid home cordless phones?
Many things, some of it were cordless phones (and a lot of other unlicensed stuff like garage openers and what not), some portions were military, etc.
If FCC decided to give it to cell phones, the result would have been pretty useless: the phones would simply not work in the face of interference from millions of all sorts of devices and vice versa, home phones, garage openers and what not would not work in the proximity of cell phones. In other words: total chaos.
Trying to get people off the 900MHz band while millions upon millions of devices are in use would have been a multi-decade undertaking consisting basically of trying to outlast the devices as they break, since no home owner is going to get rid of his garage opener until it falls apart.
What actually put the nail in the coffin of the Soviet attempt was that their chief space program man who was responsible for their earlier successes died.
The 30 engine unwieldy monstrosity that was N-1 was a direct result of his ambitious underlings going after each other throats, with the one who was most politically connected, but also the least suitable for the job, winning.
Sour grapes. It's not like the information about supported networks is difficult to find. Maybe next time you'll do your research before irresponsibly throwing down your dollars.
Huh? That is because I did my research that I did not buy the phone. Its UMTS band usage was not known however before its release and based on hype a lot of people waited for it, myself included, only to be disappointed when it finally arrived.
Blame North America for trying to be different there, not Nokia for going for the largest worldwide coverage.
Also, as some already pointed out, "being different" in this case means "having existing use for the frequencies due to historically far more extensive utilization of radio frequencies", whereas Europe (and much of the rest of the world), starting form essentially a blank slate, had the luxury of picking whatever frequencies struck their fancy, looong after those same frequencies were already in use in North America.
In essence your argument is to demand that US and Canada remake their roads for Right-Hand Drive cars because some British car maker is too lazy or greedy to bother with making a Left-Hand Drive model for the US market. Oh and redo all the bolts in use in the USA to metric while we are at it...
Actually the "blame" for the different band allocation lies with history. Many frequencies were allocated to different services in Europe and North America, some of these services having not existed in one place or another. When the advent of cellular phones came about, the companies got what was available at the moment. The European HDSPA (aka 3G) bands were used by different things in the USA and Canada and so different bands were allocated. This of course keeps changing as some older services become obsolete and some new bands become available for other uses.
That's not Nokia's fault. In order to cover the US market, they would have to offer different versions for AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint.
Nobody is expecting them to make a CDMA phone. But as to GSM and friends, there are many phones that support all the global standards, the decision was purely discretionary on Nokia's part.
As I mentioned to another poster, WIND is a pipe-dream at this point. They barely have some minimal coverage in Toronto and judging by the scale of infrastructure required, it will be years before they are a viable option in the rest of the country. And DAve is not even that far along (i.e. their business is comprised nearly entirely of press releases).
Blame North America for trying to be different there, not Nokia for going for the largest worldwide coverage
Nokia could have made a phone that supports all the global standards, many such phones exist. They chose not to do so. What you are saying is that we should blame England when some car maker decides not to make a Right Hand Drive car for Japanese or New Zealand market. It is the maker's choice, the "responsiblity" is not on the whole historical chain of decisions that lead to the establishment of a particular national system.
Nokia pissed me off to no end with the N900. I was waiting for the thing, postponing any phone related purchases.... and when it comes out it turns out that it does not support the 3G system offered in Canada by Rogers (and apparently also by AT&T in the US). EDGE only. Which at the price tag the thing comes with renders the entire excercise rather pointless (and no WiFi is not an acceptable fall-back for many of us).
Well I am sure that with millions spent on "debunking" this fiasco Ford would have come up with something. Many somethings actually. But one can also remember that Pinto was recalled and the tanks re-engineered. Lawsuits were also settled. But then you are entitled to believe the "debunkers" and The Unsassailable Virtue of Capitalism that prevents Illustrious and Pure CEOs from Straying Afar. I on the other hand chose not to be so gullible. Pinto of course being one of many, many examples of similar corporate behaviour (and speaking of Japanese cars...). And we only know of the ones who got caught with their paws in the cookie-jar, many others having gotten away with it.
It is my view that all of these 18th century, simplistic ideologies were never capable of scaling up from a "rustic town" level to gigantic industrial nations and global economies. Capitalism "works" (kind of) when shoe-makers, bakers, smiths and flour mills are the largest industrial entities around. As the size and power (and numbers of employees and the depths of managerial pyramids) increases, the thing is increasingly shaky finally imploding completely at the present levels, resulting in de-facto oligarchic-kleptocratic-neo-feudalism, which is what we get now.
The only feasible cure is to limit the size of possible entities in operation (to a fraction of their current size), and thus to return the thing to a more stable (and also vastly more equitable) scenario. Unfortunately the way things are going it is not unlikely that in a 100 years or so a few mega-corporations will end up owning 99%+ of global assets and become practical rulers of the planet, absolute kings and emperors in all but name. This trend is already well advanced, last statistical data indicating that the "top" 5% of global population already has 90%+ of global assets (and the trend is accelerating towards further consolidation).
The core principle of capitalism is making mutually beneficial transactions.
No. The core principle of Capitalism is Greed, transactions are simply a mechanism to satisfy that greed. There is no requirement that the transaction are "mutually beneficial" and one can easily see that by the way they are conducted in real life: most consumers are ripped off on a regular basis and many transactions are benefiting only one side, the other being coerced or bamboozled into the action.
The standard cop-out of the True Believers is that "buyers should be informed and they should beware", which is of course in practice impossible in majority of cases with most transactions.
Thus fleecing is far more the practical norm than any "mutual benefit".
If you buy something, the object was worth more to you than the money which was charged.
No, usually it is because you have no clue as to actual (or even relative) value of anything and all you can do is to engage in flawed, mis-informed gambling. To further ensure that you remain clueless, most sellers engage in elaborate obfuscation and mis-information campaigns and because they usually are far better financed and experienced at it then you, they usually win with you ending up buying something at 100x price of an identical (literally or with just a different label made in the same plant on the same assembly line on the same day) product in a warehouse two blocks down the street. Since the products are identical, it is impossible to pretend that their value (even subjectively) is somehow vastly different. Yet this is par for the course for majority of transactions.
If you sell something, then that something was worth less to you than the price you got for it.
See above. If you manage to con someone out of 10x the value (even the value you estimate yourself) most sellers would gladly do it. This conning and mis-information are again Standard Operating Procedure in majority of transactions.
This isn't a flaw, it's the way that value is maximized.
Yea, right. What is being "maximized" is the ability to manipulate buyers, value having remained wholly elusive and unquantifiable. No "maximizing" of it is going on. Case in point: most utterly destructive and counter-productive consumer practices, such as borrowing at 30% interest are also the most popular, leading to "maximizing" of utterly non-productive sections of economy, such as fictitious "derivatives" and other "financial instruments", which then collapse (repetitively, every few decades) requiring panicked influx of vast amounts of cash to stop the whole rickety pyramid of nonsense from collapsing outright.
Capitalism as espoused by fundamentalist believers is an Utopian ideal that might be operative in a world of idealistic, "honest" small-town bakers and shoe-makers but like all similar simplistic ideologies (like Communism) it falls apart as the scale grows, eventually (and inevitably) imploding into oligarchic-kleptocratic-pseudo-feudalism (which is what we are experiencing now). And before some fundamentalists start whining about "government interference", it is worth pointing out that most multinational corporations are larger and better financed (sometimes by few orders of magnitude) than many nations.
Personally, I see Truth as a many-dimensioned object, which, like a hypercube, we can never fully picture in our minds. Each one views it from a different angle.
Err, that is a fallacy. If the truth is infinitely different when viewed from different "angles", then essentially anyone can pick any "truth" and act accordingly. There would be some kind of a "fundamentalist wack-job truth" that is on par with "rigorously analyzed and empirically proven scientific truth". Every bomb-strapped-to-his-ass fanatic would be right as equally as an arithmetician writing 2+2=4.
This is of course what fanatics of all stripes have been braying all along, things going so far as some political lunatics claiming that they "create their own reality" because they are somehow "special".
And naturally this id radically different from what I was saying: that our empirical experimentation can expose the truth of our common and current reality (as far as it is testable) and the question of any additional meta-truths beyond, truths which cannot be empirically experienced (and thus are untestable) is irrelevant because with or without additional "meta" levels of reality nothing changes as far as our life is concerned and there are infinite (literally) number of possible "meta" worlds with their attendant "meta truths".
170HP without a catalytic converter. US regulations required one and so it lost around 40HP on top of that in the US version. 200HP was the design specs which they could not actually meet in production.
Err, unless it was modified - no. The factory produced DMC-12 used a 170HP PRV engine (a Peugeot-Renault-Volvo design) without a catalytic converter, which when fitted with one as per US regulations lost further 40HP for a grand total of 130HP. Not exactly a racetrack terror given the car's weight of 1.2 metric tons.
... did humanity a favor by removing large sums of money from the scammed (fools) who can't then use that money for other foolish purposes...
Err, if you get right down to the bottom of it, this is in fact the core principle of Capitalism, i.e. impoverishment of "fools" (i.e. people unable or unwilling to adjust to become sufficiently effective savages towards all around them) and rewarding of "smart" people (i.e. those who are all too willing to take advantage of everyone else around them) by whatever means they can get away with. The difference between a "criminal" and a "successful businessman" is largely a very subjective one.
For example, while most "legitimate" businesses produce a product, say a car, they also engage in advantage taking of all around them in order to survive, they pay as little as they can get away with to their employees, they studiously ignore social and environmental impact of their products, they go to extreme measures to "manage cost versus risk" by deliberately exposing their dupes... I mean "customers" to possibility of flaming death in order to increase loot etc and so on.
What you're saying is you don't care about "Truth", which I completely respect
Err, that is what "truth" is, i.e. it is contextual. There is no "absolute" truth but there is "local" truth, that is as applicable to the context of the "game" of our empirical existence (however brought about). It is the only kind of truth that counts (and in fact the only kind of "truth" that exists).
If you say that there is some sort of "meta" truth, ascertainable only by the method of "sufficiently fanatical and irrational faith", I would simply posit that there is "meta-meta" truth of higher order yet, which is denied to religious wackos... to which religious wackos would respond with "meta-meta-meta" "truth" visible only to those fanatics who bang themselves on the head sufficiently vigorously with a 2x4 while chanting prayers... and so on.
You are only partially right and the GP post is indeed very insightful. For most people, myself included, there were always the few very enticing intellectual "carrots" to offset the very many "sticks" in the academic environment. For every exciting subject, where I had a lot of fun and where I could indeed participate in a mentor/student dynamics with excellent professors, there were at least 5 "jump-through-the-hoops-and-keep-your-mouth-shut", compulsory, no opt-out, (and frankly utterly pointless) subjects. I hear that some colleges of 1960s era (the generation before mine) were far more fun and far less "follow the authority figure or else" places. But serf-mindset-indoctrination was well advanced (and rapidly expanding) in the place I went to by the time I enrolled. I hear it was not an isolated situation and the whole world of academia has been steadily evolving towards efficient manufacture of corporate serfs, complete with egregious advances in the indoctrination into "intellectual property" regimes and the concept of (publicly funded) corporate ownership of all research and student ideas.
From the "USA #1, USA #1, USA #1! English Redneck Dictionary":
Dictator <Dick-Ta-Tur> (noun) - any leader of any country who dares defy the will and commands of the Righteous USA, Home of the Brave, Land of the Free (tm), or who refuses to prostrate before the Global Corporations, they who deliver our daily bread, praised they be forever!
Most of us WoW players are casuals, dropping in for an hour or two each day that would otherwise be spent on television.
Yeah, what he said! We are just social drink... I mean smok... I mean players, we can quit anytime we want. Any time at all. Any time we feel like it. We have no problem, no problem at all... gotta go, there is a raid on.
Perhaps it would help if the other side made a distinction between military targets and civilian ones. As it is, any attack by any bunch of extremists is considered by the established order as "terrorist". An idiot walks into a mall with a suicide-vest and blows himself/herself up. The verdict of politicians, the media and the general populace: he/she is a terrorist. A few dudes get on a rickety, inflatable rubber boat loaded with explosives, waddle up in plain view to a sophisticated, armed-to-the-teeth, multi-hundred-million-dollar destroyer, salute to the crew on board and blow themselves up. Verdict: terrorists.
Then you have dudes with rusty rifles hiding in mountains and engaging in sporadic fire fights with an overpowering foreign occupation force -- complete with heavy armor and utter air superiority -- that overrun their country. They too apparently are "terrorists", albeit of the "cowardly unlawful combatant" type (whatever nonsense that is supposed to mean).
As you can see there is absolutely no incentive for any of these to aim at military targets exclusively, especially in that last case where the occupying force has a very long record of blowing up everything that moves, including thousands of women and children.
Slashdot Mirror
Recent high-end phones do: Blackberry Bold 9700, HTC Dream (the US version has both), etc.
Many things, some of it were cordless phones (and a lot of other unlicensed stuff like garage openers and what not), some portions were military, etc.
If FCC decided to give it to cell phones, the result would have been pretty useless: the phones would simply not work in the face of interference from millions of all sorts of devices and vice versa, home phones, garage openers and what not would not work in the proximity of cell phones. In other words: total chaos.
Trying to get people off the 900MHz band while millions upon millions of devices are in use would have been a multi-decade undertaking consisting basically of trying to outlast the devices as they break, since no home owner is going to get rid of his garage opener until it falls apart.
What actually put the nail in the coffin of the Soviet attempt was that their chief space program man who was responsible for their earlier successes died.
The 30 engine unwieldy monstrosity that was N-1 was a direct result of his ambitious underlings going after each other throats, with the one who was most politically connected, but also the least suitable for the job, winning.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Huh? That is because I did my research that I did not buy the phone. Its UMTS band usage was not known however before its release and based on hype a lot of people waited for it, myself included, only to be disappointed when it finally arrived.
Also, as some already pointed out, "being different" in this case means "having existing use for the frequencies due to historically far more extensive utilization of radio frequencies", whereas Europe (and much of the rest of the world), starting form essentially a blank slate, had the luxury of picking whatever frequencies struck their fancy, looong after those same frequencies were already in use in North America.
In essence your argument is to demand that US and Canada remake their roads for Right-Hand Drive cars because some British car maker is too lazy or greedy to bother with making a Left-Hand Drive model for the US market. Oh and redo all the bolts in use in the USA to metric while we are at it...
Actually the "blame" for the different band allocation lies with history. Many frequencies were allocated to different services in Europe and North America, some of these services having not existed in one place or another. When the advent of cellular phones came about, the companies got what was available at the moment. The European HDSPA (aka 3G) bands were used by different things in the USA and Canada and so different bands were allocated. This of course keeps changing as some older services become obsolete and some new bands become available for other uses.
Nobody is expecting them to make a CDMA phone. But as to GSM and friends, there are many phones that support all the global standards, the decision was purely discretionary on Nokia's part.
See above about WIND and its viability. In some areas of Toronto you might get away with it .... and that's just about it for years to come.
As to WiFi I live and work in an area where hot-spots are rarer than hen's teeth.
As I mentioned to another poster, WIND is a pipe-dream at this point. They barely have some minimal coverage in Toronto and judging by the scale of infrastructure required, it will be years before they are a viable option in the rest of the country. And DAve is not even that far along (i.e. their business is comprised nearly entirely of press releases).
WIND is at this point a startup, covering some parts of Toronto only. It will be years before they have a national coverage to speak of.
Nokia could have made a phone that supports all the global standards, many such phones exist. They chose not to do so. What you are saying is that we should blame England when some car maker decides not to make a Right Hand Drive car for Japanese or New Zealand market. It is the maker's choice, the "responsiblity" is not on the whole historical chain of decisions that lead to the establishment of a particular national system.
Nokia pissed me off to no end with the N900. I was waiting for the thing, postponing any phone related purchases .... and when it comes out it turns out that it does not support the 3G system offered in Canada by Rogers (and apparently also by AT&T in the US). EDGE only. Which at the price tag the thing comes with renders the entire excercise rather pointless (and no WiFi is not an acceptable fall-back for many of us).
All I can say is: Fucketey Fuck!
Well I am sure that with millions spent on "debunking" this fiasco Ford would have come up with something. Many somethings actually. But one can also remember that Pinto was recalled and the tanks re-engineered. Lawsuits were also settled. But then you are entitled to believe the "debunkers" and The Unsassailable Virtue of Capitalism that prevents Illustrious and Pure CEOs from Straying Afar. I on the other hand chose not to be so gullible. Pinto of course being one of many, many examples of similar corporate behaviour (and speaking of Japanese cars ...). And we only know of the ones who got caught with their paws in the cookie-jar, many others having gotten away with it.
It is my view that all of these 18th century, simplistic ideologies were never capable of scaling up from a "rustic town" level to gigantic industrial nations and global economies. Capitalism "works" (kind of) when shoe-makers, bakers, smiths and flour mills are the largest industrial entities around. As the size and power (and numbers of employees and the depths of managerial pyramids) increases, the thing is increasingly shaky finally imploding completely at the present levels, resulting in de-facto oligarchic-kleptocratic-neo-feudalism, which is what we get now.
The only feasible cure is to limit the size of possible entities in operation (to a fraction of their current size), and thus to return the thing to a more stable (and also vastly more equitable) scenario. Unfortunately the way things are going it is not unlikely that in a 100 years or so a few mega-corporations will end up owning 99%+ of global assets and become practical rulers of the planet, absolute kings and emperors in all but name. This trend is already well advanced, last statistical data indicating that the "top" 5% of global population already has 90%+ of global assets (and the trend is accelerating towards further consolidation).
No. The core principle of Capitalism is Greed, transactions are simply a mechanism to satisfy that greed. There is no requirement that the transaction are "mutually beneficial" and one can easily see that by the way they are conducted in real life: most consumers are ripped off on a regular basis and many transactions are benefiting only one side, the other being coerced or bamboozled into the action.
The standard cop-out of the True Believers is that "buyers should be informed and they should beware", which is of course in practice impossible in majority of cases with most transactions.
Thus fleecing is far more the practical norm than any "mutual benefit".
No, usually it is because you have no clue as to actual (or even relative) value of anything and all you can do is to engage in flawed, mis-informed gambling. To further ensure that you remain clueless, most sellers engage in elaborate obfuscation and mis-information campaigns and because they usually are far better financed and experienced at it then you, they usually win with you ending up buying something at 100x price of an identical (literally or with just a different label made in the same plant on the same assembly line on the same day) product in a warehouse two blocks down the street. Since the products are identical, it is impossible to pretend that their value (even subjectively) is somehow vastly different. Yet this is par for the course for majority of transactions.
See above. If you manage to con someone out of 10x the value (even the value you estimate yourself) most sellers would gladly do it. This conning and mis-information are again Standard Operating Procedure in majority of transactions.
Yea, right. What is being "maximized" is the ability to manipulate buyers, value having remained wholly elusive and unquantifiable. No "maximizing" of it is going on. Case in point: most utterly destructive and counter-productive consumer practices, such as borrowing at 30% interest are also the most popular, leading to "maximizing" of utterly non-productive sections of economy, such as fictitious "derivatives" and other "financial instruments", which then collapse (repetitively, every few decades) requiring panicked influx of vast amounts of cash to stop the whole rickety pyramid of nonsense from collapsing outright.
Capitalism as espoused by fundamentalist believers is an Utopian ideal that might be operative in a world of idealistic, "honest" small-town bakers and shoe-makers but like all similar simplistic ideologies (like Communism) it falls apart as the scale grows, eventually (and inevitably) imploding into oligarchic-kleptocratic-pseudo-feudalism (which is what we are experiencing now). And before some fundamentalists start whining about "government interference", it is worth pointing out that most multinational corporations are larger and better financed (sometimes by few orders of magnitude) than many nations.
Err, that is a fallacy. If the truth is infinitely different when viewed from different "angles", then essentially anyone can pick any "truth" and act accordingly. There would be some kind of a "fundamentalist wack-job truth" that is on par with "rigorously analyzed and empirically proven scientific truth". Every bomb-strapped-to-his-ass fanatic would be right as equally as an arithmetician writing 2+2=4.
This is of course what fanatics of all stripes have been braying all along, things going so far as some political lunatics claiming that they "create their own reality" because they are somehow "special".
And naturally this id radically different from what I was saying: that our empirical experimentation can expose the truth of our common and current reality (as far as it is testable) and the question of any additional meta-truths beyond, truths which cannot be empirically experienced (and thus are untestable) is irrelevant because with or without additional "meta" levels of reality nothing changes as far as our life is concerned and there are infinite (literally) number of possible "meta" worlds with their attendant "meta truths".
170HP without a catalytic converter. US regulations required one and so it lost around 40HP on top of that in the US version. 200HP was the design specs which they could not actually meet in production.
Err, unless it was modified - no. The factory produced DMC-12 used a 170HP PRV engine (a Peugeot-Renault-Volvo design) without a catalytic converter, which when fitted with one as per US regulations lost further 40HP for a grand total of 130HP. Not exactly a racetrack terror given the car's weight of 1.2 metric tons.
Err, if you get right down to the bottom of it, this is in fact the core principle of Capitalism, i.e. impoverishment of "fools" (i.e. people unable or unwilling to adjust to become sufficiently effective savages towards all around them) and rewarding of "smart" people (i.e. those who are all too willing to take advantage of everyone else around them) by whatever means they can get away with. The difference between a "criminal" and a "successful businessman" is largely a very subjective one.
For example, while most "legitimate" businesses produce a product, say a car, they also engage in advantage taking of all around them in order to survive, they pay as little as they can get away with to their employees, they studiously ignore social and environmental impact of their products, they go to extreme measures to "manage cost versus risk" by deliberately exposing their dupes ... I mean "customers" to possibility of flaming death in order to increase loot etc and so on.
Err, that is what "truth" is, i.e. it is contextual. There is no "absolute" truth but there is "local" truth, that is as applicable to the context of the "game" of our empirical existence (however brought about). It is the only kind of truth that counts (and in fact the only kind of "truth" that exists).
If you say that there is some sort of "meta" truth, ascertainable only by the method of "sufficiently fanatical and irrational faith", I would simply posit that there is "meta-meta" truth of higher order yet, which is denied to religious wackos ... to which religious wackos would respond with "meta-meta-meta" "truth" visible only to those fanatics who bang themselves on the head sufficiently vigorously with a 2x4 while chanting prayers ... and so on.
You are only partially right and the GP post is indeed very insightful. For most people, myself included, there were always the few very enticing intellectual "carrots" to offset the very many "sticks" in the academic environment. For every exciting subject, where I had a lot of fun and where I could indeed participate in a mentor/student dynamics with excellent professors, there were at least 5 "jump-through-the-hoops-and-keep-your-mouth-shut", compulsory, no opt-out, (and frankly utterly pointless) subjects. I hear that some colleges of 1960s era (the generation before mine) were far more fun and far less "follow the authority figure or else" places. But serf-mindset-indoctrination was well advanced (and rapidly expanding) in the place I went to by the time I enrolled. I hear it was not an isolated situation and the whole world of academia has been steadily evolving towards efficient manufacture of corporate serfs, complete with egregious advances in the indoctrination into "intellectual property" regimes and the concept of (publicly funded) corporate ownership of all research and student ideas.
From the "USA #1, USA #1, USA #1! English Redneck Dictionary":
Yeah, what he said! We are just social drink... I mean smok... I mean players, we can quit anytime we want. Any time at all. Any time we feel like it. We have no problem, no problem at all... gotta go, there is a raid on.
Perhaps it would help if the other side made a distinction between military targets and civilian ones. As it is, any attack by any bunch of extremists is considered by the established order as "terrorist". An idiot walks into a mall with a suicide-vest and blows himself/herself up. The verdict of politicians, the media and the general populace: he/she is a terrorist. A few dudes get on a rickety, inflatable rubber boat loaded with explosives, waddle up in plain view to a sophisticated, armed-to-the-teeth, multi-hundred-million-dollar destroyer, salute to the crew on board and blow themselves up. Verdict: terrorists.
Then you have dudes with rusty rifles hiding in mountains and engaging in sporadic fire fights with an overpowering foreign occupation force -- complete with heavy armor and utter air superiority -- that overrun their country. They too apparently are "terrorists", albeit of the "cowardly unlawful combatant" type (whatever nonsense that is supposed to mean).
As you can see there is absolutely no incentive for any of these to aim at military targets exclusively, especially in that last case where the occupying force has a very long record of blowing up everything that moves, including thousands of women and children.
Really, what about this glorious, titanic, cosmic pile of festering turds?