is that it is a revolutionary way to surf the web on a mobile device. All the mobile devices until today cannot surf with even a modicum of the pleasure you get with the iPhone.
My laptop is a "mobile device" and I can actually browse flash websites with it. Plus with an EV-DO card from Verizon or Sprint I can actually attain useful speeds. Something that isn't really possible with the 2G iPhone.
I generally get about 24-25MPG in the summer and only 22-23 in the winter. Of course most of that probably has to do with people not knowing how to drive on snow thus causing my commute to be longer with more stop and go.
During the winter the gas is also formulated differently, which has an effect. Plus you are running your rear defroster, which is a huge drain on the electrical system and thus the engine, as well as the blower, wipers, etc, etc. The engine is also less efficient when it's cold.
If you are financially responsible, you maintain health insurance and the ability to pay a large unexpected expense (*what* it is may be unexpected, but *something* happens to everyone eventually
Do you have any idea how large unexpected medical expenses can be? It's very easy to say "maintain health insurance". What if your health insurance sucks? I have fairly good health insurance for day-to-day problems but if I became seriously ill the co-pays would wipe out my savings in short order. Co-payments for lab work, co-payments for hospital admissions, co-payments for each Dr's Visit, co-payments for medicine, etc, etc, etc.
There are plenty of problems with the credit reporting agencies, but penalizing people who couldn't cope with an unplanned expense isn't one of them.
Penalizing them with regards to obtaining future credit is not the problem. Penalizing them by preventing them from getting a job is part of the problem. One could also argue that penalizing them by rate-jacking them on insurance rates is also part of the problem.
Live responsibly within your means and these are not critical problems
You can live entirely within your means, never using (or using and paying in full) a credit card for anything and still wind up with a shitty credit score/report. All it takes is one major illness while having crappy or no medical insurance. Medical problems are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Other things (natural disasters, unemployment, divorce, bad investments, etc, etc) can also cause your financial situation to become untenable without ever trying to live beyond your means.
And while it's illegal for an employer to fire you because of a past bankruptcy, it's not illegal for them to fire you based upon derogatory information (i.e: missed payments) on your credit report. Nice catch-22 there, isn't it? Name one person that has filed bankruptcy who doesn't have other derogatory information on their credit report....
Make the accumulation of wealth a priority and abandon status symbols entirely and it won't take too many years before credit doesn't matter much
That's good advice for anybody. But it's a myth that most people are driven to financial ruin by trying to live beyond their means.
What a great idea! put all your personal information into a form linked from slashdot.
This got an insightful mod? Give me a fucking break. Yes, I've been on/. for four years, have over 2,000 posts and good karma but I'm trying to provide a link so I can scam people's personal information! That must be it!
You don't trust the site I linked? Go look at this one from the FTC then. It gives you a number (888-5-OPTOUT) to call if you'd rather do that then fill out the online form. It also links to a website, which is (surprise, surprise) the same one that I provided.
Unless you think the FTC is providing you with a link to a phishing site I really don't see what the problem is.
Obviously you've never had to deal with the fallout from a bad credit file. Yes, on the surface it appears that the law is written in the consumers favor. Go read some credit repair boards and see how well that works out in practice. See how the data providers(credit card companies) just "verify" any dispute that comes down without doing actual research. See how the credit reporting agencies outright refuse to follow the law (try getting them to do a proper procedures request).
The entire industry is set up in favor of their customers (the data providers and creditors), not the consumers whose lives they ruin. The existing laws are either too weak or are just ignored outright.
Does anyone really think it is ok to just allow lenders to defame the name and credit history of anyone unlucky enough to have their SSN stolen?
More to the point, our credit heavy soceity has allowed less then honest companies to blackmail consumers that have legitimate business disputes by threatening to sour your credit report. In the old days if you had an honest dispute with a company and refused to pay them they could sue you and both sides would get their day in court. Now they can just insert an item into your credit file, wait until you are denied employment/that mortgage/security clearance/etc/etc and know that you will pay up because they basically have you by the balls.
No due process of law and the burden of proof is on the consumer to prove that the derogatory information is false -- not on the company to prove that it's true.
No snail-mail spam about preapproved credit offers. It's saved me much over the last year in time devoted to shredding.
Actually, most freeze laws (at least the one in New York, which I'm most familiar with) do not stop the pre-approval offers that are clogging your mailbox. The most effective way to do this is to "opt-out" with all four CRAs. You can do that here. A five year opt-out is completely online. For a permanent one you need to sign a letter and mail it back to them. This is what I did.
Regardless of whether or not you freeze your credit (not everybody can) everybody should do this. Opt-out with all four agencies and follow up with them a few months later to make sure they actually did it. Three (Trans Union, Equifax, Innovis) processed it properly for me but Experian never did until I followed up with them.
This is sort of scary because one of the deterrents from using nukes like hand grenades is the lasting effects of them. If it is ever found that we could walk into an area hit by a nuke and clean it up in five years or so, that deterrent isn't really a deterrent any more.
I don't think that's the real deterrent. We sent troops into Japan within days of the atomic bombings. Dropping one nuke on a city does not render that city inhabitable by any stretch of the imagination.
The deterrent from using nukes like hand grenades is the fact that it will drive every country in the world to try and obtain them if you use them on a non-nuclear state. Using them on a nuclear state obviously subjects you to retaliation.
Eh, it's not like I disagree with you on the trivial amount of resources bit. And pay per use rates ($0.15/ea on every major US provider) are highway robbery. I was just disputing the GPs assumption that IM via SMS is too expensive to use. I don't consider half a penny per SMS "expensive". Whether or not it's "fair" given that SMS costs them nothing is a whole another story.
your cell phone is talking to 2-4 cell phone towers to ensure it has the best signal
Actually, in GSM, your cell phone is listening to anywhere from 1 to 6 sites, not talking to them. An idle GSM phone will periodically send a keep alive signal to whichever tower it is listening to at the time. During a call a GSM phone only talks to one site at a time. It monitors the signal levels of nearby sites and will request a handoff based on that (or if instructed to handoff by the network). CDMA phones will listen to and talk with multiple sites at the same time (it's called soft handoff) though.
calculating your round time trip to each tower
This is how GSM phones are located for E-911. But the phone isn't actively "talking" to the other sites used for triangulation. And in a rural area there may very well only be one cell site within range of your phone. In this scenario a GSM network will not be able to locate your exact position -- they will only be able to narrow you down to the sector of the cell site and your approximate distance from the site.
None of this applies to CDMA networks. The very nature of CDMA makes it damn near impossible to locate using triangulation. That's why the CDMA providers opted for an AGPS solution. At no point did the Government require them to use GPS. It was just the easiest solution to the problem of locating people for E-911.
By law in the US, your cell phone provider needs to know where you are within about 25 feet.
Actually, the law is that they need to be able to locate you to within 25 meters and only when you place a call to 911. There is no law requiring them to keep tabs on your location at any other time.
Of course that doesn't mean that they aren't doing this. But point me to a law or regulation that requires them to do so.
Your cell phone provider NEEDS to know where you are at least within the radius of a cell tower. That's kind of how it works.
Not at all times they don't. GSM uses "location areas" specifically to avoid the phone having to contact the network every single time that it moves between cell sites. Depending on the lay of the land and the number of users in a given area this location area may be as large as an entire city and suburbs (my entire region has the same location area code on T-Mo's network) or it may be as small as a single city block in a more urban area.
But the point is, that at least with GSM they do not even need to know which specific site your phone is listening to when it is idle. When it's active and on a call is another matter altogether.
"You don't want your phone to be an open platform," meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs.
Jobs' statement is FUD and needs to be challenged.
Indeed. If you can "gum up" a providers network with a crummy application then the provider needs to take a serious look at the design of their network.
Seriously. Can I write an application for my PC that can take down Roadrunner's network? Didn't think so....
Unlimited SMS/MMS on T-Mo is $14.99/mo. Between SMS and IM I'll use about 3,000 - 4,000 a month. That works out to less then half a penny per IM or SMS. That's not cheap?
and we're now into the 21st century and not a peep of psychic power or spirituality is to be had
In the Babylon 5 universe, human psi powers were born when the Vorlon's messed with the Human genome to create them. The Vorlon's created psi powers in most of the younger races to use as weapons against the Shadows.
How doesn't that work? It's part of the story. Not some "humans outgrew violence and got psi powers" nonsense.
Whether or not it would be allowed to happen is another question altogether. But if it did happen, China would come out on the worst end of it. They have enough nuclear capacity to act as an effective deterrent, but not enough to make an offensive attack and succeed.
Kudos for that argument. I made it for the EU awhile back when some EU tool stated that they could "atomic-bitchslap" the US and Russia and nobody wanted to listen to it. Russia and the United States are the only two nations that can play offensive nuclear war with any chance of success (albeit, "success" in nuclear war probably implies millions of deaths on your side and total genocide for whomever you were going after).
Unfortunately, we have guys like Ahmahdinejad in Iran, steadfastly denying the Holocaust while at the same time working their butts off to make deliverable nuclear weapons as part of their planning for the next Holocaust.
That guy scares me more then Kim Jong ever will. At least Kim's motives are obvious and somewhat understandable (survival of his regime). Ahmahdinejad's goals remain a mystery.
it is likely to trigger an Iranian attempt to nuke Israel, and whether it's successful or not, retaliation in kind by the Israelis
The Israelis have a couple hundred missiles that can be nuclear tipped and reach any point of Iran. They can completely destroy Iran if they choose to do so. One can only hope that it doesn't come to that....
the distance you can go is essentially limited only by earth curvature.
That's why I use a moon bounce for all of my wi-fi communication needs. Sure, the latency is a bitch, but I don't have to deal with that pesky curved Earth limiting my range.
Why don't just pull out that spare computer from the closet, set it up for her, and point it to the file server with all the music so she can enjoy Elton John and Moulin Rouge without bothering your iTunes?
Some councillors do have unofficial "districts" where their support is strongest, but this is not a requirement in any way.
Right, so if we do that for House elections, who is my Congressman? Who do I write my concerns to? Who do I go to if I have a problem with a Federal agency? Is my Congressman going to ignore me if I'm obviously somebody who didn't vote for him because he doesn't have a "district" that I live in?
I have Cingular/AT&T and I've never had a problem with call quality. It's a phone, not a hi-fi.
Compare the quality of a call side by side with a T-Mobile call running with the full-rate codec and you'll change your mind pretty quickly. Granted, T-Mobile doesn't always run at full-rate, their networks will fall back to half-rate if they have capacity issues during peak usage, but at least they give it to you when they can (which is virtually all the time in suburban/rural areas, generally only have capacity issues in urban areas). AT&T runs at half-rate regardless of the available network capacity in a given area.
If you really want to get sad, compare any cell phone (even a full-rate GSM or 13k CDMA) to a landline->landline call. Nobody realizes just how much quality they've dumped in order to squeeze more calls into their networks.
Slashdot Mirror
My laptop is a "mobile device" and I can actually browse flash websites with it. Plus with an EV-DO card from Verizon or Sprint I can actually attain useful speeds. Something that isn't really possible with the 2G iPhone.
Just food for thought.
During the winter the gas is also formulated differently, which has an effect. Plus you are running your rear defroster, which is a huge drain on the electrical system and thus the engine, as well as the blower, wipers, etc, etc. The engine is also less efficient when it's cold.
It's from Sneakers.
Sneakers @ Wikipedia, Sneakers @ IMDB.
Do you have any idea how large unexpected medical expenses can be? It's very easy to say "maintain health insurance". What if your health insurance sucks? I have fairly good health insurance for day-to-day problems but if I became seriously ill the co-pays would wipe out my savings in short order. Co-payments for lab work, co-payments for hospital admissions, co-payments for each Dr's Visit, co-payments for medicine, etc, etc, etc.
There are plenty of problems with the credit reporting agencies, but penalizing people who couldn't cope with an unplanned expense isn't one of them.Penalizing them with regards to obtaining future credit is not the problem. Penalizing them by preventing them from getting a job is part of the problem. One could also argue that penalizing them by rate-jacking them on insurance rates is also part of the problem.
See this post if you don't trust my link.
You can live entirely within your means, never using (or using and paying in full) a credit card for anything and still wind up with a shitty credit score/report. All it takes is one major illness while having crappy or no medical insurance. Medical problems are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Other things (natural disasters, unemployment, divorce, bad investments, etc, etc) can also cause your financial situation to become untenable without ever trying to live beyond your means.
And while it's illegal for an employer to fire you because of a past bankruptcy, it's not illegal for them to fire you based upon derogatory information (i.e: missed payments) on your credit report. Nice catch-22 there, isn't it? Name one person that has filed bankruptcy who doesn't have other derogatory information on their credit report....
Make the accumulation of wealth a priority and abandon status symbols entirely and it won't take too many years before credit doesn't matter muchThat's good advice for anybody. But it's a myth that most people are driven to financial ruin by trying to live beyond their means.
This got an insightful mod? Give me a fucking break. Yes, I've been on /. for four years, have over 2,000 posts and good karma but I'm trying to provide a link so I can scam people's personal information! That must be it!
You don't trust the site I linked? Go look at this one from the FTC then. It gives you a number (888-5-OPTOUT) to call if you'd rather do that then fill out the online form. It also links to a website, which is (surprise, surprise) the same one that I provided.
Unless you think the FTC is providing you with a link to a phishing site I really don't see what the problem is.
Obviously you've never had to deal with the fallout from a bad credit file. Yes, on the surface it appears that the law is written in the consumers favor. Go read some credit repair boards and see how well that works out in practice. See how the data providers(credit card companies) just "verify" any dispute that comes down without doing actual research. See how the credit reporting agencies outright refuse to follow the law (try getting them to do a proper procedures request).
The entire industry is set up in favor of their customers (the data providers and creditors), not the consumers whose lives they ruin. The existing laws are either too weak or are just ignored outright.
Does anyone really think it is ok to just allow lenders to defame the name and credit history of anyone unlucky enough to have their SSN stolen?
More to the point, our credit heavy soceity has allowed less then honest companies to blackmail consumers that have legitimate business disputes by threatening to sour your credit report. In the old days if you had an honest dispute with a company and refused to pay them they could sue you and both sides would get their day in court. Now they can just insert an item into your credit file, wait until you are denied employment/that mortgage/security clearance/etc/etc and know that you will pay up because they basically have you by the balls.
No due process of law and the burden of proof is on the consumer to prove that the derogatory information is false -- not on the company to prove that it's true.
Actually, most freeze laws (at least the one in New York, which I'm most familiar with) do not stop the pre-approval offers that are clogging your mailbox. The most effective way to do this is to "opt-out" with all four CRAs. You can do that here. A five year opt-out is completely online. For a permanent one you need to sign a letter and mail it back to them. This is what I did.
Regardless of whether or not you freeze your credit (not everybody can) everybody should do this. Opt-out with all four agencies and follow up with them a few months later to make sure they actually did it. Three (Trans Union, Equifax, Innovis) processed it properly for me but Experian never did until I followed up with them.
I don't think that's the real deterrent. We sent troops into Japan within days of the atomic bombings. Dropping one nuke on a city does not render that city inhabitable by any stretch of the imagination.
The deterrent from using nukes like hand grenades is the fact that it will drive every country in the world to try and obtain them if you use them on a non-nuclear state. Using them on a nuclear state obviously subjects you to retaliation.
Eh, it's not like I disagree with you on the trivial amount of resources bit. And pay per use rates ($0.15/ea on every major US provider) are highway robbery. I was just disputing the GPs assumption that IM via SMS is too expensive to use. I don't consider half a penny per SMS "expensive". Whether or not it's "fair" given that SMS costs them nothing is a whole another story.
Actually, in GSM, your cell phone is listening to anywhere from 1 to 6 sites, not talking to them. An idle GSM phone will periodically send a keep alive signal to whichever tower it is listening to at the time. During a call a GSM phone only talks to one site at a time. It monitors the signal levels of nearby sites and will request a handoff based on that (or if instructed to handoff by the network). CDMA phones will listen to and talk with multiple sites at the same time (it's called soft handoff) though.
calculating your round time trip to each towerThis is how GSM phones are located for E-911. But the phone isn't actively "talking" to the other sites used for triangulation. And in a rural area there may very well only be one cell site within range of your phone. In this scenario a GSM network will not be able to locate your exact position -- they will only be able to narrow you down to the sector of the cell site and your approximate distance from the site.
None of this applies to CDMA networks. The very nature of CDMA makes it damn near impossible to locate using triangulation. That's why the CDMA providers opted for an AGPS solution. At no point did the Government require them to use GPS. It was just the easiest solution to the problem of locating people for E-911.
Actually, the law is that they need to be able to locate you to within 25 meters and only when you place a call to 911. There is no law requiring them to keep tabs on your location at any other time.
Of course that doesn't mean that they aren't doing this. But point me to a law or regulation that requires them to do so.
Your cell phone provider NEEDS to know where you are at least within the radius of a cell tower. That's kind of how it works.
Not at all times they don't. GSM uses "location areas" specifically to avoid the phone having to contact the network every single time that it moves between cell sites. Depending on the lay of the land and the number of users in a given area this location area may be as large as an entire city and suburbs (my entire region has the same location area code on T-Mo's network) or it may be as small as a single city block in a more urban area.
But the point is, that at least with GSM they do not even need to know which specific site your phone is listening to when it is idle. When it's active and on a call is another matter altogether.
Indeed. If you can "gum up" a providers network with a crummy application then the provider needs to take a serious look at the design of their network.
Seriously. Can I write an application for my PC that can take down Roadrunner's network? Didn't think so....
Talk about giving everybody the worst possible guide of everyday British life...
That's ok, it's not like we American's don't have anything to be embarrassed about either ;)
IMing via SMS? Yeah, THAT sounds cheap. Not! :)
Unlimited SMS/MMS on T-Mo is $14.99/mo. Between SMS and IM I'll use about 3,000 - 4,000 a month. That works out to less then half a penny per IM or SMS. That's not cheap?
and we're now into the 21st century and not a peep of psychic power or spirituality is to be had
In the Babylon 5 universe, human psi powers were born when the Vorlon's messed with the Human genome to create them. The Vorlon's created psi powers in most of the younger races to use as weapons against the Shadows.
How doesn't that work? It's part of the story. Not some "humans outgrew violence and got psi powers" nonsense.
Whether or not it would be allowed to happen is another question altogether. But if it did happen, China would come out on the worst end of it. They have enough nuclear capacity to act as an effective deterrent, but not enough to make an offensive attack and succeed.
Kudos for that argument. I made it for the EU awhile back when some EU tool stated that they could "atomic-bitchslap" the US and Russia and nobody wanted to listen to it. Russia and the United States are the only two nations that can play offensive nuclear war with any chance of success (albeit, "success" in nuclear war probably implies millions of deaths on your side and total genocide for whomever you were going after).
Unfortunately, we have guys like Ahmahdinejad in Iran, steadfastly denying the Holocaust while at the same time working their butts off to make deliverable nuclear weapons as part of their planning for the next Holocaust.
That guy scares me more then Kim Jong ever will. At least Kim's motives are obvious and somewhat understandable (survival of his regime). Ahmahdinejad's goals remain a mystery.
it is likely to trigger an Iranian attempt to nuke Israel, and whether it's successful or not, retaliation in kind by the Israelis
The Israelis have a couple hundred missiles that can be nuclear tipped and reach any point of Iran. They can completely destroy Iran if they choose to do so. One can only hope that it doesn't come to that....
the distance you can go is essentially limited only by earth curvature.
That's why I use a moon bounce for all of my wi-fi communication needs. Sure, the latency is a bitch, but I don't have to deal with that pesky curved Earth limiting my range.
Why don't just pull out that spare computer from the closet, set it up for her, and point it to the file server with all the music so she can enjoy Elton John and Moulin Rouge without bothering your iTunes?
I would, but I'm too busy having sex ;)
Why don't you just stick to porn and wanking like the rest of us?
Because it's not as fun and a lil Elton John and Moulin Rouge is worth having access to a sex partner?
Some councillors do have unofficial "districts" where their support is strongest, but this is not a requirement in any way.
Right, so if we do that for House elections, who is my Congressman? Who do I write my concerns to? Who do I go to if I have a problem with a Federal agency? Is my Congressman going to ignore me if I'm obviously somebody who didn't vote for him because he doesn't have a "district" that I live in?
I have Cingular/AT&T and I've never had a problem with call quality. It's a phone, not a hi-fi.
Compare the quality of a call side by side with a T-Mobile call running with the full-rate codec and you'll change your mind pretty quickly. Granted, T-Mobile doesn't always run at full-rate, their networks will fall back to half-rate if they have capacity issues during peak usage, but at least they give it to you when they can (which is virtually all the time in suburban/rural areas, generally only have capacity issues in urban areas). AT&T runs at half-rate regardless of the available network capacity in a given area.
If you really want to get sad, compare any cell phone (even a full-rate GSM or 13k CDMA) to a landline->landline call. Nobody realizes just how much quality they've dumped in order to squeeze more calls into their networks.