they'd probably be out setting up speed traps on hidden curves just below a hill. There are tons of those around here.:-)
True enough and while I hate speed traps as much as the next driver I don't think they have as negative of an impact on society as the "War of Drugs". Society says that I can poison my liver with booze or shorten my life span with tobacco but I can't legally possess pot?
My favorite is New Hampshire. The Libertarian paradise. I can legally ride a motorcycle without a helmet in that state but I can't possess pot.
The essence of your argument is revenge, not the betterment of society.
No, it's about respect for the rule of law and the basic fact that no nation can absorb a limitless number of immigrants without ill effects. If you accept that basic fact then you accept the fact that we need control over immigration. Ergo, the concept of immigration law (if not our current ineffective system) is a just one.
The belief of "I had to go through this ordeal so it's only fair that they have to endure it" is nothing more than juvenile hazing. Your friend's "paperwork nightmare from hell" only supports the claim that current immigration laws are ill-conceived, ill-purposed, and ineffective. You only wish to inflict bad laws on others because they were previously inflicted upon someone you know.
You making pretty big assumptions about me. I want to "inflict bad laws" on others because of the issues my friend is going through? No, I want an effective immigration system. And I want the people who violate the rules of that system dealt with accordingly.
The message it sends is that you don't understand what true justice is.
And just what are you advocating? Completely open borders? No controls on immigration at all? Anybody allowed to work? It's easy to take your aging hippie liberal douche position on this issue and assume that I'm the pissed off white trash redneck conservative. Give me some actual policy suggestions. If you could change the immigration system what would you do with it?
The only thing I have is a copy John Smith's SS card that may or may not be real along with his W-4 that I have no way of verifying
It just sucks being held criminally liable to verify something that I can't verify
You know that you CAN verify if an SSN is ligit and if it belongs to that person right? You also know that you are supposed to have a new employee fill out a I-9 form, which includes instructions on verifying employment eligibility, right? Look at it and hit page 3. Assuming all you have is an SSN card and a drivers license (typical for new hires) then you can verify that the SSN is ligit through the SSA. If your new hire thinks ahead (I did) they will bring their passport and save you the trouble.
Either way, it's pretty easy to verify that somebodies SSN isn't fake and that they can legally work. The tools are there for those that want to use them. The problem is that the people hiring illegals don't care.
I'm sure all Native Americans would agree that European settlement in the US was always done by the book, right?
By the book of the day it was. But that's kinda not part of this debate is it?
I cannot condemn a person for breaking a law that I, in their position, would break myself.
I may not condemn them but I don't condone them either.
"It's the law" is a empty position if you cannot justify the law itself.
I think of all sorts of reasons to justify why illegal immigration is bad. It strains our social infrastructure, our health care infrastructure and our law enforcement agencies. It creates an entire class of people that depend on the services of the nation but don't contribute toward those services (taxes). It creates an entire class of people that can be exploited by businesses and criminals alike with no protection from either.
It's also blatantly unfair to those who decided to come here legally. A Canadian friend of mine has been waiting to come here for months. She has going through a paperwork nightmare from hell to get her green card. This is in spite of the fact that she has a masters degree and speaks three languages. We make her wait even though she is well educated, has family and a job waiting for her but we are willing to give amnesty to those that break our laws? What kind of message does that send?
This is the one issue that you would find agreement on across most sections of the political spectrum. Ask the common man on the street if this is a problem that needs to stop and he will say yes. It doesn't matter if he is a Republican or a Democrat. Unfortunately our political leaders have failed us miserably on this issue. The Republicans are owned by big business that likes cheap labor and the Democrats are owned by the PC crowd that feels bad for them and is afraid of being labeled racists. Both parties want the Hispanic vote.
A number of SOHO routers suffer from exactly this problem, the D-link and Netgears from memory. The only solution is to turn off the DNS cache altogether.
I've never seen that behavior but I'll take your word for it because I've never bothered to mess around with a SOHO router for anything more then setting it up for clients and forgetting about it. I've always used Linux for NAT for my own purposes.
The first thing I'd do is outlaw fine print. Don't call it "unlimited" and use 4pt font that flashes across the bottom of the ad for two frames to make it something else.
Sounds to me like you're running a dodgy DNS server on your router; it fills up the memory with DNS cache (which you have a lot of when you P2P) and crashes.
Exactly what P2P client bothers to do reverse lookups on IP addresses in it's default configuration?
I have reasonably fast 6MPS downstream, but my upstream is throttled to a small fraction of that by my ISP.
That's a technical decision by the broadband industry. They set aside more frequencies for downstream because presumably most people don't need to do big uploads. On cable networks the upstream also needs to be a lower frequency to make it back to the head-end (the upstream channel is typically below cable channel 2) and this also tends to limit the bandwidth available.
What I don't understand is why nobody has bothered to release a "dynamic" DSL product. DSL works by taking whatever frequencies are usable (how high you can go depends on the length of the loop) and breaking them down into channels. Some of those are set aside for upstream, some (the bulk, in the case of ADSL) for downstream. Why not have a dynamic solution that re-allocates the channels for up or downstream depending on what you are doing at the moment (uploading or download)? I don't think this would work on a shared cable network but I see no reason why it couldn't be done for DSL.
but because of the nature of my job, I do often have to transfer large, uncompressed video files
Make your job provide you with a business-grade connection with higher upstream.
Not really a problem. I've been thinking this for a little while: ISPs need to raise their rates
Really? Is there actually a bandwidth problem or is this a solution looking for a problem? For all the crying by the telcos about capacity I've never noticed any major issues -- even on my stupid residential connection at home.
If Verizon and AT&T (both of them Tier One internet providers) have a capacity issue then I think we have a bigger problem then downloading porno videos. This is FUD on their part to justify their stance against network neutrality. And their practice of cherry picking extremely profitable customers (Grandma who pays $40/mo for DSL to read her e-mail) and ditching the rest of us (anybody who uses bittorrent).
And I've said this before but I'll say it again: If their networks truly can't handle selling services as "unlimited" (though I suspect they can and all the crying is just FUD/PR) then they shouldn't be selling them as unlimited. Start metering service and charging overages. Seems to work for the cell phone industry.
would still kill you by boiling the water in your body
Not instantly. If I was really bored I could probably run some numbers and figure out how much energy it would take to raise all the water in the human body to a high enough temperature to kill that human, it doesn't even need to boil -- hyperthermia would kill you long before that. Given that the human body is over 50% water and a gallon of water weighs ~8.5 pounds you are talking about several gallons of water. How much energy would you need to raise that water to a fatal temperature and how quickly can your microwave oven supply that amount of energy?
Granted, I'm not volunteering to stand in a microwave and try this, but the point is that microwaves aren't special. It's not instant death to be exposed to them -- even at really high power levels.
So, what your saying is that the total amount of RF energy related to Wi-Fi dissipated in the entire building (not the power absorbed by a human being in that building) throughout the day is roughly equal to 57.6 kilojoules or about 13.76 kilocalories (i.e: food calories)?
That's about a tenth of the amount of energy that I can find in a single bottle of beer. And people really think this is a health risk? What do those 57,600 joules do? It's all dissipated as heat sooner or later. 57,600 joules of heat added to the human body across eight hours isn't exactly a major problem -- you receive more heat energy standing in the sun for a few minutes and last time I checked that isn't killing anybody.
What about the power level of the handset's TX? I know that (falcon series) iDEN handsests are 600mW, what's CDMA and GSM running at?
As I recall the FCC limits the max power output to 2 Watts in the Cellular (850mhz) band and 1 Watt in the PCS (1900mhz) band. The actual power output is typically much lower though. CDMA requires strict power control of the handsets in order to function (the base station needs to receive all of the incoming signals at the same power level -- otherwise one will overwhelm the others) and even GSM reduces the power of the handset whenever it can in order to prolong battery life.
Also, GSM and iDEN use TDMA (time division multiple access) so the handset isn't transmitting 100% of the time.
Ever noticed your cell phone get hotter then normal when using it in a low signal area? It's consuming more power to boost the TX in order to reach the base station.
That's also why we're not all dead from radiation exposure.
Microwave radiation isn't directly harmful -- it's non-ionizing. The guy who discovered the utility of microwaves for cooking did so while working on a radar set. He noted that he felt really warm and that a candy bar in his pocket had started to melt.
I don't advise sitting in a microwave while it's active but even a really leaky one wouldn't directly kill you. The most it would do is heat up your skin and possibly damage your eyes. If you are stupid enough to sit in front of it and not turn it off as this is happening then you probably deserve to die.
n other words, the thought process (if you can call it that) was not, "let's find a frequency for 802.11b that is free of interference from other sources". It was more along the lines of, "let's find a frequency for 802.11b so that 802.11b won't mess up anything of impor
I'm pretty sure that "Let's find a frequency that's unlicensed so we can legally use it" was part of the thought process too.......
I've always wondered why these networks use 2.4GHz radio waves.
I think it mainly had to do with the fact that the same part of 2.4GHz is open for unlicensed use globally. The other unlicensed ISM (industrial-scientific-medical) bands in the United States are used for other stuff in other nations. The easiest example is 900mhz. Part of it is available for unlicensed use in the United States. But as anybody with a quad-band GSM phone knows, that's a cellular band in most of the rest of the world.
You are not required to purchase a phone from a cell phone company in the United States
You are if you use Verizon Wireless. They won't activate non-VZW branded phones. I'm pretty sure that Sprint is the same way. Besides, have you ever tried to find a non-branded CDMA phone?
On GSM (Cingular or T-Mobile) you can do whatever you want. But forget it if you are locked into a contract with a CDMA carrier.
I wonder if that's a way to get out of the Cingular iPhone contract.
I wonder how long until somebody figures out how to hack the iPhone to unlock it and let you put any SIM card you want into it. Sure, the enhanced Cingular-dependant features (visual voicemail) might not work -- but if somebody wants to use it strictly as a fancy mp3 player/cell phone there's no reason why this wouldn't work.
Re:well-thats-not-very-exciting
on
FCC Approves iPhone
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· Score: 2, Interesting
NiMH, LiON et al just don't need replacing that often
Sure about that? Maybe you aren't as heavy of a cell user as I am but I've noted that every phone I've ever owned has needed a battery replacement. The talk and standby times on my LiON phones are noticeably reduced after 12 months. At 18-24 months it's bad enough to require a new battery or a new phone. And personally, I'd rather buy a new battery if nothing is wrong with my phone.
How much do you use your cell? I'm cell only and tend to log about 3,000-4,000 minutes a month -- plus about 2,000 texts, which actually seem to use more juice then voice -- probably because of keeping the backlight lit for so long -- I can drain my seven hour talktime battery in one day with heavy texting. I'd suspect that with less use the battery wears out less.
massive handset subsidies on contracts
I think the concept of "massive subsidies" is a myth that the carriers use to justify their ETFs and the whole concept of contracts. It would be interesting to see what happened to cell phone prices if people had to buy them first and then get service to go with the phone.
EDGE's theoretical maximum is 473 kbps, while EVDO's is 2.4 Mbps - five times as fast. Real world performance is more like 800-1200 kbps, which is still four times the real-world performance you can expect from EDGE.
And all EVDO requires is that you sign away your life to a CDMA provider that locks you into crippled and proprietary phones. No thanks. T-Mobile may not have a great phone selection but I can go buy one directly from Motorola or Nokia and throw my SIM into it if I so desire. Ditto for Cingular.
I'm kinda surprised that this being/. that nobody pointed out that GSM is an open and global standard. CDMA (specifically IS-95 and the evolution thereof) is a closed and patented "standard". If you want to make CDMA equipment get ready to write a check to Qualcomm.
Unicel has a firm grasp (sp/grasp/stranglehold) on the GSM network up here
Well a monopoly sucks but trust me when I say that you really don't want to do business with Cingular. It's too bad that T-Mobile doesn't have a presence in your state. They are the only one of the big four that I'm willing to give my money too.
If 50% of your calls, or more, are in non-network coverage areas for Cingular, you get the 'sorry-we've-dropped-you-as-valued-customer' letter.
Yeah, I know people who have used that to escape Cingular contracts. Take your Cingular phone up to a roaming partner and use a few thousand minutes of N&W calls. Costs you nothing and they kick you off. Then port your number to a more friendly provider. Incidentally T-Mobile doesn't do this. You can use any of their roaming partners as much as you want. I spent about four months in North Carolina roaming the entire time on Suncom or Cingular. Never heard a peep from T-Mo about it.
Re:Apple will still need lots of luck
on
FCC Approves iPhone
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· Score: 5, Insightful
AT&T as a captive carrier
You know, I really don't care for Apple and I tend to think that most of their products are more marketing success then actual functionality, but even so you can't really blame them for AT&T being a captive carrier. That's the way the damn cell industry works in the United States. The carriers have all the power. Ever tried to create an app for a cell phone? Ever tried to do something in the interest of your users and not in the interest of the carriers? Good luck!
Verizon and AT&T rank as the least friendly carriers to do business with -- both for developers and for their end users. Crippled phones, disabled features, draconian terms of service, etc, etc, etc. Sprint is slightly better and T-Mobile USA is probably the most friendly but even they pale in comparison to the freedom of choice that exists in the rest of the World.
I would encourage everybody to go read this document. It explains how the industry works and advocates for an adoption of wireless network neutrality and applying the carterphone rules to the wireless industry. There is simply no excuse for why I can't just go down to Wally World, buy any phone I want (from a $20 el-cheapo POS to a $600 PDA), plug my SIM card (or RUIM card for CDMA) into it and use it.
especially when the folks at my job called in the middle of a game to complain about server or internet outages.
I wonder what would happen if somebody sued the Federal Gov't because they had a heart attack or some such and couldn't call for help because Bush was in town?
Motorcades, helicopters, suppression of legitimate protest (free speech "zones"), disruption of communications networks, blah, blah, blah. When did the President of the United States become a Monarch exactly? How much money does it cost for him to merely travel two miles to the State of the Union?
There has to be a happy medium between this level of praetorian guard bullshit and the Presidents of old where just about anybody could come into the White House and meet with them.
Slashdot Mirror
they'd probably be out setting up speed traps on hidden curves just below a hill. There are tons of those around here. :-)
True enough and while I hate speed traps as much as the next driver I don't think they have as negative of an impact on society as the "War of Drugs". Society says that I can poison my liver with booze or shorten my life span with tobacco but I can't legally possess pot?
My favorite is New Hampshire. The Libertarian paradise. I can legally ride a motorcycle without a helmet in that state but I can't possess pot.
Now i don't want to bring up the legality of marijuana
Why not? Why is any money spent on marijuana enforcement? Couldn't those ten cops with the sting operation have been out patrolling somewhere?
The essence of your argument is revenge, not the betterment of society.
No, it's about respect for the rule of law and the basic fact that no nation can absorb a limitless number of immigrants without ill effects. If you accept that basic fact then you accept the fact that we need control over immigration. Ergo, the concept of immigration law (if not our current ineffective system) is a just one.
The belief of "I had to go through this ordeal so it's only fair that they have to endure it" is nothing more than juvenile hazing. Your friend's "paperwork nightmare from hell" only supports the claim that current immigration laws are ill-conceived, ill-purposed, and ineffective. You only wish to inflict bad laws on others because they were previously inflicted upon someone you know.
You making pretty big assumptions about me. I want to "inflict bad laws" on others because of the issues my friend is going through? No, I want an effective immigration system. And I want the people who violate the rules of that system dealt with accordingly.
The message it sends is that you don't understand what true justice is.
And just what are you advocating? Completely open borders? No controls on immigration at all? Anybody allowed to work? It's easy to take your aging hippie liberal douche position on this issue and assume that I'm the pissed off white trash redneck conservative. Give me some actual policy suggestions. If you could change the immigration system what would you do with it?
The only thing I have is a copy John Smith's SS card that may or may not be real along with his W-4 that I have no way of verifying
It just sucks being held criminally liable to verify something that I can't verify
You know that you CAN verify if an SSN is ligit and if it belongs to that person right? You also know that you are supposed to have a new employee fill out a I-9 form, which includes instructions on verifying employment eligibility, right? Look at it and hit page 3. Assuming all you have is an SSN card and a drivers license (typical for new hires) then you can verify that the SSN is ligit through the SSA. If your new hire thinks ahead (I did) they will bring their passport and save you the trouble.
Either way, it's pretty easy to verify that somebodies SSN isn't fake and that they can legally work. The tools are there for those that want to use them. The problem is that the people hiring illegals don't care.
I'm sure all Native Americans would agree that European settlement in the US was always done by the book, right?
By the book of the day it was. But that's kinda not part of this debate is it?
I cannot condemn a person for breaking a law that I, in their position, would break myself.
I may not condemn them but I don't condone them either.
"It's the law" is a empty position if you cannot justify the law itself.
I think of all sorts of reasons to justify why illegal immigration is bad. It strains our social infrastructure, our health care infrastructure and our law enforcement agencies. It creates an entire class of people that depend on the services of the nation but don't contribute toward those services (taxes). It creates an entire class of people that can be exploited by businesses and criminals alike with no protection from either.
It's also blatantly unfair to those who decided to come here legally. A Canadian friend of mine has been waiting to come here for months. She has going through a paperwork nightmare from hell to get her green card. This is in spite of the fact that she has a masters degree and speaks three languages. We make her wait even though she is well educated, has family and a job waiting for her but we are willing to give amnesty to those that break our laws? What kind of message does that send?
This is the one issue that you would find agreement on across most sections of the political spectrum. Ask the common man on the street if this is a problem that needs to stop and he will say yes. It doesn't matter if he is a Republican or a Democrat. Unfortunately our political leaders have failed us miserably on this issue. The Republicans are owned by big business that likes cheap labor and the Democrats are owned by the PC crowd that feels bad for them and is afraid of being labeled racists. Both parties want the Hispanic vote.
Pour 137ml of boiling water on your skin.
It would hurt and give me third degree burns on that part of my skin but it wouldn't kill me, which is what this whole thread is about, right?
A number of SOHO routers suffer from exactly this problem, the D-link and Netgears from memory. The only solution is to turn off the DNS cache altogether.
I've never seen that behavior but I'll take your word for it because I've never bothered to mess around with a SOHO router for anything more then setting it up for clients and forgetting about it. I've always used Linux for NAT for my own purposes.
barring fine print
The first thing I'd do is outlaw fine print. Don't call it "unlimited" and use 4pt font that flashes across the bottom of the ad for two frames to make it something else.
Sounds to me like you're running a dodgy DNS server on your router; it fills up the memory with DNS cache (which you have a lot of when you P2P) and crashes.
Exactly what P2P client bothers to do reverse lookups on IP addresses in it's default configuration?
I have reasonably fast 6MPS downstream, but my upstream is throttled to a small fraction of that by my ISP.
That's a technical decision by the broadband industry. They set aside more frequencies for downstream because presumably most people don't need to do big uploads. On cable networks the upstream also needs to be a lower frequency to make it back to the head-end (the upstream channel is typically below cable channel 2) and this also tends to limit the bandwidth available.
What I don't understand is why nobody has bothered to release a "dynamic" DSL product. DSL works by taking whatever frequencies are usable (how high you can go depends on the length of the loop) and breaking them down into channels. Some of those are set aside for upstream, some (the bulk, in the case of ADSL) for downstream. Why not have a dynamic solution that re-allocates the channels for up or downstream depending on what you are doing at the moment (uploading or download)? I don't think this would work on a shared cable network but I see no reason why it couldn't be done for DSL.
but because of the nature of my job, I do often have to transfer large, uncompressed video files
Make your job provide you with a business-grade connection with higher upstream.
Not really a problem. I've been thinking this for a little while: ISPs need to raise their rates
Really? Is there actually a bandwidth problem or is this a solution looking for a problem? For all the crying by the telcos about capacity I've never noticed any major issues -- even on my stupid residential connection at home.
If Verizon and AT&T (both of them Tier One internet providers) have a capacity issue then I think we have a bigger problem then downloading porno videos. This is FUD on their part to justify their stance against network neutrality. And their practice of cherry picking extremely profitable customers (Grandma who pays $40/mo for DSL to read her e-mail) and ditching the rest of us (anybody who uses bittorrent).
And I've said this before but I'll say it again: If their networks truly can't handle selling services as "unlimited" (though I suspect they can and all the crying is just FUD/PR) then they shouldn't be selling them as unlimited. Start metering service and charging overages. Seems to work for the cell phone industry.
would still kill you by boiling the water in your body
Not instantly. If I was really bored I could probably run some numbers and figure out how much energy it would take to raise all the water in the human body to a high enough temperature to kill that human, it doesn't even need to boil -- hyperthermia would kill you long before that. Given that the human body is over 50% water and a gallon of water weighs ~8.5 pounds you are talking about several gallons of water. How much energy would you need to raise that water to a fatal temperature and how quickly can your microwave oven supply that amount of energy?
Granted, I'm not volunteering to stand in a microwave and try this, but the point is that microwaves aren't special. It's not instant death to be exposed to them -- even at really high power levels.
100mW * 20pcs * 28 800 seconds = 57 600 joules
So, what your saying is that the total amount of RF energy related to Wi-Fi dissipated in the entire building (not the power absorbed by a human being in that building) throughout the day is roughly equal to 57.6 kilojoules or about 13.76 kilocalories (i.e: food calories)?
That's about a tenth of the amount of energy that I can find in a single bottle of beer. And people really think this is a health risk? What do those 57,600 joules do? It's all dissipated as heat sooner or later. 57,600 joules of heat added to the human body across eight hours isn't exactly a major problem -- you receive more heat energy standing in the sun for a few minutes and last time I checked that isn't killing anybody.
What about the power level of the handset's TX? I know that (falcon series) iDEN handsests are 600mW, what's CDMA and GSM running at?
As I recall the FCC limits the max power output to 2 Watts in the Cellular (850mhz) band and 1 Watt in the PCS (1900mhz) band. The actual power output is typically much lower though. CDMA requires strict power control of the handsets in order to function (the base station needs to receive all of the incoming signals at the same power level -- otherwise one will overwhelm the others) and even GSM reduces the power of the handset whenever it can in order to prolong battery life.
Also, GSM and iDEN use TDMA (time division multiple access) so the handset isn't transmitting 100% of the time.
Ever noticed your cell phone get hotter then normal when using it in a low signal area? It's consuming more power to boost the TX in order to reach the base station.
That's also why we're not all dead from radiation exposure.
Microwave radiation isn't directly harmful -- it's non-ionizing. The guy who discovered the utility of microwaves for cooking did so while working on a radar set. He noted that he felt really warm and that a candy bar in his pocket had started to melt.
I don't advise sitting in a microwave while it's active but even a really leaky one wouldn't directly kill you. The most it would do is heat up your skin and possibly damage your eyes. If you are stupid enough to sit in front of it and not turn it off as this is happening then you probably deserve to die.
n other words, the thought process (if you can call it that) was not, "let's find a frequency for 802.11b that is free of interference from other sources". It was more along the lines of, "let's find a frequency for 802.11b so that 802.11b won't mess up anything of impor
I'm pretty sure that "Let's find a frequency that's unlicensed so we can legally use it" was part of the thought process too.......
I've always wondered why these networks use 2.4GHz radio waves.
I think it mainly had to do with the fact that the same part of 2.4GHz is open for unlicensed use globally. The other unlicensed ISM (industrial-scientific-medical) bands in the United States are used for other stuff in other nations. The easiest example is 900mhz. Part of it is available for unlicensed use in the United States. But as anybody with a quad-band GSM phone knows, that's a cellular band in most of the rest of the world.
You are not required to purchase a phone from a cell phone company in the United States
You are if you use Verizon Wireless. They won't activate non-VZW branded phones. I'm pretty sure that Sprint is the same way. Besides, have you ever tried to find a non-branded CDMA phone?
On GSM (Cingular or T-Mobile) you can do whatever you want. But forget it if you are locked into a contract with a CDMA carrier.
I wonder if that's a way to get out of the Cingular iPhone contract.
I wonder how long until somebody figures out how to hack the iPhone to unlock it and let you put any SIM card you want into it. Sure, the enhanced Cingular-dependant features (visual voicemail) might not work -- but if somebody wants to use it strictly as a fancy mp3 player/cell phone there's no reason why this wouldn't work.
NiMH, LiON et al just don't need replacing that often
Sure about that? Maybe you aren't as heavy of a cell user as I am but I've noted that every phone I've ever owned has needed a battery replacement. The talk and standby times on my LiON phones are noticeably reduced after 12 months. At 18-24 months it's bad enough to require a new battery or a new phone. And personally, I'd rather buy a new battery if nothing is wrong with my phone.
How much do you use your cell? I'm cell only and tend to log about 3,000-4,000 minutes a month -- plus about 2,000 texts, which actually seem to use more juice then voice -- probably because of keeping the backlight lit for so long -- I can drain my seven hour talktime battery in one day with heavy texting. I'd suspect that with less use the battery wears out less.
massive handset subsidies on contracts
I think the concept of "massive subsidies" is a myth that the carriers use to justify their ETFs and the whole concept of contracts. It would be interesting to see what happened to cell phone prices if people had to buy them first and then get service to go with the phone.
EDGE's theoretical maximum is 473 kbps, while EVDO's is 2.4 Mbps - five times as fast. Real world performance is more like 800-1200 kbps, which is still four times the real-world performance you can expect from EDGE.
And all EVDO requires is that you sign away your life to a CDMA provider that locks you into crippled and proprietary phones. No thanks. T-Mobile may not have a great phone selection but I can go buy one directly from Motorola or Nokia and throw my SIM into it if I so desire. Ditto for Cingular.
I'm kinda surprised that this being /. that nobody pointed out that GSM is an open and global standard. CDMA (specifically IS-95 and the evolution thereof) is a closed and patented "standard". If you want to make CDMA equipment get ready to write a check to Qualcomm.
Unicel has a firm grasp (sp/grasp/stranglehold) on the GSM network up here
Well a monopoly sucks but trust me when I say that you really don't want to do business with Cingular. It's too bad that T-Mobile doesn't have a presence in your state. They are the only one of the big four that I'm willing to give my money too.
If 50% of your calls, or more, are in non-network coverage areas for Cingular, you get the 'sorry-we've-dropped-you-as-valued-customer' letter.
Yeah, I know people who have used that to escape Cingular contracts. Take your Cingular phone up to a roaming partner and use a few thousand minutes of N&W calls. Costs you nothing and they kick you off. Then port your number to a more friendly provider. Incidentally T-Mobile doesn't do this. You can use any of their roaming partners as much as you want. I spent about four months in North Carolina roaming the entire time on Suncom or Cingular. Never heard a peep from T-Mo about it.
AT&T as a captive carrier
You know, I really don't care for Apple and I tend to think that most of their products are more marketing success then actual functionality, but even so you can't really blame them for AT&T being a captive carrier. That's the way the damn cell industry works in the United States. The carriers have all the power. Ever tried to create an app for a cell phone? Ever tried to do something in the interest of your users and not in the interest of the carriers? Good luck!
Verizon and AT&T rank as the least friendly carriers to do business with -- both for developers and for their end users. Crippled phones, disabled features, draconian terms of service, etc, etc, etc. Sprint is slightly better and T-Mobile USA is probably the most friendly but even they pale in comparison to the freedom of choice that exists in the rest of the World.
I would encourage everybody to go read this document. It explains how the industry works and advocates for an adoption of wireless network neutrality and applying the carterphone rules to the wireless industry. There is simply no excuse for why I can't just go down to Wally World, buy any phone I want (from a $20 el-cheapo POS to a $600 PDA), plug my SIM card (or RUIM card for CDMA) into it and use it.
especially when the folks at my job called in the middle of a game to complain about server or internet outages.
I wonder what would happen if somebody sued the Federal Gov't because they had a heart attack or some such and couldn't call for help because Bush was in town?
Motorcades, helicopters, suppression of legitimate protest (free speech "zones"), disruption of communications networks, blah, blah, blah. When did the President of the United States become a Monarch exactly? How much money does it cost for him to merely travel two miles to the State of the Union?
There has to be a happy medium between this level of praetorian guard bullshit and the Presidents of old where just about anybody could come into the White House and meet with them.
Trusting without verification is exactly how so many people lose money to 419 scams.
Verification is fine. Storing my fingerprints for the next few decades is not verification.