Shortwave wouldn't be practical, not enough bandwidth, radio propagation is too variable, storms interfere a lot more with short wave.
Cellular is one of our six options for data on the road:
1) Call someone and ask him. I usually am in convoy with professional meteorologists and/or researchers, and they often have people they can call. So do I sometimes.
2) Stop at a library and use their high speed connection. Every library in the country apparently has high speed internet. Whenever we have found a library open in any tiny burg (for example, in Vega, TX - look it up if you can find it), they have internet available.
3) Stop at a truck stop, motel or other place where we can plug a land line modem into their phone line. A number of truck stops have phones at the restaurant tables. Besides, truck stops are neat places anyway. Some are now setting up Wi-Fi hotspots, which is even better. Now the truckers can order up their hookers without using the CB;-)
4) Stop at a radio shack that has connectivity, and use their computer.
5) Stop and use the cell phone (it really pays to have free nationwide roaming!) with a cell phone modem. External antenna helps a lot. Amplifier may, although mine seemed to either not work to start with, or pooped out.
6) Try to use the cell phone while in motion (very frustrating, but occasionally you can get in an image or two).
Off the subject of phones, but for those interested in storm chasing, check out the Stormtrack website, which has replaced the eponymous magazine as the central chaser publication. Also the mailing list WX-CHASE is an active on-line chaser community. My own chase logs (not that impressive) are here. 2003 is not yet complete.
"Heavy Weather" was indeed a pretty neat book. Chasing the F-6!
We use FRS, GMRS, CB and ham for intervehicle communications (depending on who has what). We ues cell for talking to other teams farther away, for contacting "nowcasters" - people at home or at work with access to real-time weather data, and we sometimes dial up ISP's using cell phone modems to get the data ourselves.
I am considering just giving up on the integrated phone until the market gets straightened out, and just go with two widgets. But in the past I had a PalmV and a small cell phone and carrying both was a nuisance. Also, much easier to forget one of them.
Regarding my objection re: analog. When you get way out in the boondocks, you are still likely to find analog service which you can roam to - if your phone allows it. You are less likely to find your appropriate brand of digital service, since there are three frequency bands and three modulation standards (GSM, CDMA, TDMA) in the US.
Thus analog is a backup that you really want to have if you plan to reliably have service outside of major cities and highways.
The most common crash is when I start the car with the speakerphone adapter turned on. Now, I know, one shouldn't do that. But a modern device like the 6035 *should* have the ability to tolerate power spikes and brownouts... after all, the darn thing has a battery in it!
As far as integration, I may just never have learned how to use it well enough. Also, I have a very early 6035. Is the firmware field upgradable?
Actually, the subject line is an excuse to broaden the subject a bit....
In the US you usually have to buy your phone from your cellular provider (their attempt to reduce churn). Most won't let you just subscribe an existing phone.
So... the question comes up, with the Treo and in my case even more general (say... Kyocera 6035/7135).
Can these phones be hacked to replace a phone that you register? In other words, can I go to XYZ carrier, get one of their dirt cheap little phones, and then hack my fancy organizer-phone to have the same ID, etc as their dirt cheap phone (which I will give to the dog as a play-toy)? I understand the issues of standards (I am unlikely to hack a TDMA 800 phone to work on CDMA until SDR's are used).
Where do I find out about such hacking? Web sites... mailing lists... newsgroups?
I don't want to clone a phone to break the law. I just want my *good* phone to work on a network where the &^%%$#@ supplier won't sell me one!
Yeah... I know. I have a Kyocera 6035. I am, however, not at all happy with it. It does what I need (let me have my palm and phone in one box) but it has poor integration between the functions. It also crashes a lot.
And the other thing stopping me from getting the Kyocera 7135 is that my carrier doesn't support it (grrrrrrrrrrr). I would have to switch carriers and lose my one-number automatic switcheroonie feature (when the cell phone is on, a call to my home office goes there; when it is off, the home office rings. both share the same phone number). Of course, any solution that involves an organizer phone would require me to switch carriers, since QWest supports NO organizer phones (they didn't sell enough and the customer service drove them nuts - they are not what you would call a service oriented company!).
1) I keep a LOT of data in my palm system. In fact, it is my central organizer of data for my life. Hence, lots of memory is needed. Most phones I have looked at hold far less than I need.
2) Some of that data is quite confidential. I use a Palm aftermarket software (Secret! from http://linkesoft.com/secret/ [I like the software and I the company]). I don't know if I can get equivalent capabilities on non Palm OS's. It sort of like why I run (ugh) Windows as my main desktop - the software I need isn't available under Linux.
3) I use the palm desktop as my organizer on my PC. I don't really want to spend the time trying to write conversion software. [this is the least significant issue, btw]
This comment really applies to the US market mostly:
As a frustrated user of PDA/Phone combos, one thing that is missing from many of these is AMPS (old fashioned US analog service). This means that there are big gaps out in the sticks where no service is available. It also means that it is more difficult to roam with data service, since analog provides a universal carrier for analog cell phone modems while they don't work with digital unless you have digital data service with them.
I live in Phoenix, AZ. We have plenty of service here, but if I drive in any direction from here for more than 30 miles, I am in nowhere land (except along the interstate highways). I don't want to lose cell service there. Furthermore, during my annual storm chasing vacation in the midwest, the situation is even worse.
The other Treo's do not have analog service as far as I can tell. This one doesn't have enough info to tell.
Naturally, this is also a good place to rant about US cellular service provider issues in general. Buy your Treo and you probably have to get it from a service provider. Just taking one to a compatible service provider will, if my experience is any guide, get you the answer that "we only support phones that you buy from us."
Not "we only support the kind of phones that we sell" but "you have to buy the phone from us or screw you."
Sigh.
I am almost ready to give up, buy a little palm that is not a cell phone, and go with the flow and buy stupid little cell phones separately - carrying two around (as opposed to my current Kyocera 6035 Palm/CDMA cell phone).
Edwin, I think that most people do mistakenly conflate nuclear power and nuclear weapons. I know that anti-nuclear activists intentionally mislead people about the connection, along with misleading them about the potential dangers and benefits of both nuclear power and nuclear weapons (which are invariable treated as bad under all circumstances).
The issue in India, which is quite interesting and new to me, is probably beside the point, since it is a localized political phenomenon. However, even without that I would suspect that India would have gone nuclear eventually. It is a major geopolitical power, and nuclear status is commensurate with the resulting challenges - especially balance with China, and the threat from Pakistan.
You are certainly right, of course, to consider the vulnerability to terrorism of any nuclear facility. In fact, today in modern countries, terrorism is probably the only valid argument against nuclear power - it is certainly a factor that one would have to consider.
As a member of the generation who grew up then, I can say that the government in fact did not try to scare people about radioactivity. Rather, they were promoting nuclear power plants, nuclear bombers, nuclear rockets, etc.
The energy companies profit no matter which source we use. They aren't dumb - if we move towards nuclear, they invest in nuclear.
And we hardly needed radioactivity to convince us of the dangers of communism. Certainly atomic bombs were scary, but it wasn't radioactivity that most people focused on - it was being blown up. That communism was extremely dangerous was obvious to anyone who bothered to study it, and should be much more obvious now that much more information has come out.
I hardly think what we heard from the government in the '50s and '60s was brainwashing. In fact, most of it wasn't even propaganda (which is a lot short of brainwashing).
The people spreading false propaganda about radiation are radical environmentalists - ironically many of whom were communists or extreme leftists in earlier years. They will tell any lie to defeat nuclear power, because nuclear power does away with so many of their favorite fund-raising, regulation increasing causes: pollution and global warming.
Since the reactor will not be activated until the spacecraft has safely left the earth, the potential radiation hazard is essentially zero. The only significant radioactive elements in the propulsion system are Uranium isotopes, which are widely found in nature and which, if dispersed in the atmosphere, would increase the current radiation level on earth by EXACTLY ZERO.
Hence increased public scrutiny is silly, but of course the usually ignoramuses will raise all sorts of flack. To many, their god is the nature and their devil is radiation!
See here for some demystifying of radiation and nuclear weapons.
The health effects from plutonium, americium, and uranium intakes by humans, as determined with USTUR data can be summarized in two words, virtually none. A study of the causes of death of USTUR organ donors has been completed. The study showed that the vast majority of USTUR donors died from the same diseases that have caused the deaths of most of the U. S. population, heart disease, strokes, and cancers not necessarily associated with radiation exposure. This is in spite of the fact that the USTUR donors are a biased population in that a number of donors volunteered for the program after having been diagnosed with cancer. The average age at death of USTUR registrants is 63 years (range between 25 and 91 years). The average age of USTUR registrants who are still living is 73 years (range between 30 and 93 years).
In this case, unlikely the satellites, the rocket will contain only uranium, not highly radioactive reactor products.
In the past, Plutonium batteries have been used in spacecraft without incident. The russian satellites that came back down had reactors that had been running for a long time, and thus had short lived very hot isotopes in them, but nobody was injured by it.
Why is everyone so afraid of a little bit of radioactivity? Folks, especially slashdotters with the capability to read technical stuff and work with powers of ten, should just look at the issue a bit.
Radioactive material is toxic. So is rocket exhaust. So are zillions of other things in our environment, including all sorts of natural stuff in our food and our air. There is nothing magic or mysterious about radioactivity toxicity.
Your smoke detector contains a radioactive pellet. If you don't eat the thing, you are fine. Even if you do, you are probably okay (if a bit crazy). Dust contains radioactive materials. A large number of nuclear bombs have been exploded in the atmosphere, release lots of plutonium and other radioactive elements (the things are nowhere close to 100% efficient). We are still alive. Phosphorous products often have a raised level of radioactivity. If you are a camper with a Coleman lantern, the lantern mantles are radioactive. If you fly in an airplane or go to high altitudes (Denver, anyone), you are exposed to a lot of ionizing radiation (compared to sea level). Like getting a tan? You get it from ionizing radiation( UV rays).
Unless you are a fool, you wouldn't eat a gram of cyanide. Likewise, I wouldn't recommend eating a gram of a space probe's nuclear reactor. But that isn't going to happen!
Even if all the material were released into the environment (which is highly unlikely), the chances of harm to any one person are extremely low. You would experience far more danger driving to see the launch or just plugging in your computer!
Since the reactor is not activated until it is well away from earth, at launch it contains only uranium. Uranium is all over the place. Here in the Phoenix, AZ area there are significant concentrations in the soil in many areas where people live. My geiger counter gets 26 counts per minute in my driveway, but only 16 counts if it is sitting on top of the engine block of my car in the driveway. Wow! My driveway is radioactive. I guess I am doomed!
The uranium in a never fired nuclear reactor is no more dangerous than the uranium in soil - it is just more concentrated and has a different isotopic ratio (enriched reactor uranium is not more radioactive than unenriched - it just has a more U-235 (and less U-238). If it is dispersed in an explosion, it is no more dangerous than a dust storm here in this large metropolian area!
Anti-nuclear activists, a totally innumerate and scientifically ignorant press, the irrational conflation of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, and the unwillingness of people to look seriously at the issue have created a nuclear phobia in much of the western world.
Maybe I'm just dumb or not reading the right stuff, but what gives with Sun and Java?
Does Sun actually make money with Java? If so, how? How much?
If Sun goes into the toilet, what happens to all of us who build our applications in Java?
Re:The problem is the charging model
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Is 3G Irrelevant?
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KU is not a business, and it can do all sorts of things that consumers would reject.
I think the charging model of the future is tiered service, not per-usage billing.
Consumers don't like usage billing. If you don't believe me, notice how the cell phone companies in the US use "free one gazillion minutes on weekends and blue moon days" as their major enticement in their ads. Furthermore, local cell service is now often sold with unlimited time for local use (to compete directly with land lines).
Off the subject... back when I was at KU, we had a program that got into master mode on the main computer (actually, one of only two, but that was a LONG time ago - 1970) and reset the billing whenever we threatened to run out of our usage time. Hee hee.
As a storm chaser techie, what I need is high bandwidth internet connections in Nowhere, Nebraska and Outback, Oklahoma. You wouldn't believe the lengths storm chasers go to for good data! Imagine a van with DirectWay on the roof - yep... it's out there chasing tornados.
Of course, we are hardly an interesting market to mobile phone providers... but hey, please waste the resources, just for us.
By far the largest spending by the US government is in income transfer or in-kind payments of one sort or another - in other words, social welfare spending - just like in Europe.
The government pays Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid (if you are truly poor in the US, your health care is free - no matter what the Europeans say), housing for the poor, hundreds of silly programs to help the poor that end up discouraging them from helping themselves, enormous education costs that produce poorly educated people (the US is not very good at socialized systems like public education), food programs for the poor, child care programs for the poor, etc. Our government funds a huge percentage of the scientific research in the world, and our private industry funds much of the rest of medical research. And, of course, we waste vast amounts of money subsidizing farmers, just like Europe does. There are now more employees in the US Department of Agriculture than there are farmers in the country.
Corruption will happen in any government, one way or another. Americans actually have one of the least corrupt governments in the world, overall. If you really want to see corruption in action in a (barely still) first world country, look at France. Most of the second, third and fourth world are far worse. One reason many Americans are distrustful of big government is that we know it will be inefficient and corrupt.
Although our defense spending is higher than anyone else in the world (SOMEBODY has to take the responsibility for dealing with evildoers), it is still a tiny part of our GDP and is historically lower than it has been in the last 60 years.
A friend of mine did guidance for Project Private Enterprise (Bob Truax's launch-a-small-crazy-human-into-sub-orbital-space) about 20 years ago, and he used FORTH.
Having also used it extensively, I would say that it is a much better software package for development of an integrated, time-sensitive control system of this sort than most other modern software systems. You usually don't need much of an OS for a rocket! You need a real time kernel, and a lot of real time math.
Much easier said than done! There are miles of wire. Any break in the shielding can be enough to cause problems. Any corrosion can too.
Furthermore, the phone can cause interference by other processes, for example:
Your phone starts transmitting. It is at high power because it is hearing a weak signal. It's signal gets into your walkman via the headphone cable. Another signal, perhaps from a radio on the aircraft or another cell phone or whatever, also gets into that same cable. The two mix because the walkman is non-linear at those frequencies. The result is on the radio communications frequency, the ILS (Instrument Landing System) frequency, or GPS band.
In general, this whole thing is about incrementally improving safety. The odds of a single cell phone on a single flight causing a crash are very low. But the odds get much larger when you are talking millions of cell phones on hundreds of thousands of flights.
Even then, the cell phone may just *contribute* to an accident. Most commercial air crashes are a result of a cascade of individually recoverable failures or events. The cell phone may simply take out a backup system at a critical time, or it may interfere with a primary system (say, glideslope) while the pilot is distracted by another urgency.
For those who comment about how the presumably more susceptible legacy systems on the aircraft should be replaced... the systems mentioned include such minor systems as the only air-to-ground communications mechanism used for air traffic control, and the only instrument landing system available for many airports. Replacing this "legacy" infrastructure would require replacing every aircraft radio in every aircraft, control tower, air traffic center, etc in the world, and replacing all of the Instrument Landing Systems.
This is not trivial. Furthermore, in aircraft, it is not a good idea to rapidly replace systems that have been working and safe!
There are two aspects to this observation - one sort of reasonable, one not.
First of all, the phone signal is easily strong enough to reach hundreds of kilometers from high altitude. Cell phones transmit several hundred milliwatts of power. I once used a 100 mW ham radio mountaintop-to-mountaintop at a distance of 175 miles. Since 30,000 feet is onloy 6 miles, signal strength per se is not going to keep your cell phone from working.
Then there is the issue of antennae. The cell system antennas are oriented to maximize signal towards or below the horizon. Thus a signal from a high angle will be somewhat attenuated. Also, the shielding of the aircraft body will also attenuate the signal.
Overall, if you operate a cell phone in an aircraft, it is likely to interfere with a number of cell sites.
Then there is the problem of cities with hills or mountains in them. I live about 500 feet above average terrain in the Phoenix, AZ area. I have had a number of weird cell phone effects as a result. Cell service at my house is sporadic. I can start a call from down on the flat and it will carry most of the way home and then be lost. If I start a call at home it will be lost very quickly!
The reason appears to be that as I drive to my home, my signal is first strongest towards cell towers far to my southeast, and then I go around a corner and they are suddenly only good to the southwest. I don't think the system can handle a switch from a cell to one several cells away.
The reason appears to be the business models followed by the carriers. They can do this because the FCC decided to use much less regulation in cellular phone service (starting with PCS) than it did in the past. [As a side note, if you are an Open Spectrum advocate, you should love our current cellular system!]
I used to be able to move a phone from one carrier to another as long as they were technically compatible. Now that isn't possible. Either the old carrier won't release the unlock codes to *my* phone or the new one won't accept it. They also don't wan't me to be able to move my phone number. This same sort of thinking will make it difficult to get universal instant messaging or many other advanced services.
The companies are trying to increase the friction in competition - making it more expensive or harder for customers to move from one company to another (churn). They imagine that this is in their benefit (and it is, in the short term, for the current winners). It is certainly in the interest of cell phone manufacturers (only one of whom is American, BTW), because when you switch carriers, you have to buy a new phone.
From the point of view of a cell phone service provider, they are selling you a vertically integrated package: a wireless telephone, the service to use it on, and a telephone number, and whatever proprietary incompatible service they can dream up (photography, instant messaging, etc). This was the same vision that computer companies had prior to the internet... you not only bought your computer from them... you also bought your remote computers and the data communications protocol between them.
The mess in the US has actually benefited the rest of the world, because different companies have tried a number of different technologies (7 different standards by my last count). This was probably responsible for CDMA becoming the preferred standard for next generation almost worldwide.
If the FCC has forced a single standard (like was done in most countries), TDMA would have been the result, for various reasons not worth getting into here.
As technical people, we recognize that interoperability and portability are optimal. But the average consumer does not. However, this one issue (portable phone numbers) is directly visible to them, so it is not surprising that it is the first to be regulated.
Once the cell phone providers get serious about advanced services (text and picture messaging, etc), they will encounter consumer resistance to their current plans. Who is going to want to buy an expensive, fancy phone if they can only communicate voice with anyone not on their carrier, and if they need to buy a different one to move to another carrier? Why buy text messaging unless it is universal (that one, via internet portals, is much closer to reality, but not by the intent of the carriers)?
As a side note... I have a Kyocera 6035 which I paid a bundle for. I really want a cell-phone/organizer combo, and I'd like a new, smaller one. Unfortunately, different phone vendors accept different ones, and only a few provide true roaming (BEWARE... if you buy some of these slick Palm OS or Windows-something phones, you won't be able to talk to ANYONE when you are out in the boondocks - they don't do analog AMPS phone). Kyocera has a new, better version, the 7135 (or something like that). It is compatible with my current carrier (Qwest), but THEY WON'T LET ME USE ONE! They don't sell them, don't want to sell them, and won't let me use one if I buy it elsewhere.
Sigh. Europe wins when it comes to mobile phone service!
It would be really, really stupid for the US not to have a program for dominating space, given that it has the capability in every other theater of war, and more and more of that capability depends upon space based technology. And longtime allies can become enemies or can assist enemies (you only need a two month long memory to know that).
Those who think the US is evil or a big ogre for this have little concept of the difference between the actuality of conflict of national interest and the non-existence of some marvelous, peace-loving big momma world government.
The purpose of the US military is to defend the US. We are the most likely target (largest economy, natural focus for hatred from any dissatisified group anywhere, reluctant world policeman).
But I suppose we should do as implied by all the highly moderated posts in this thread... NOT protect our GPS assets from hostile threats, and NOT be able to deny accurate space-based navigation to potential hostiles.
Then France will sell the next nuclear armed tyrant a nice guidance system for WMD's, which he will provide to nameless terrorists who will use it to kill even more Americans than on 9-11.
Yeah... that's a clever strategy. It's like coating yourself in money and walking around blindfolded in a bad part of town! Real smart!
And of course nobody will complain when our GPS is disabled and we have to use dumb bombs in large numbers, causing huge amounts of collateral damage, the next time we or someone else is threatened (remember, we also used smart bombs when Europe came begging for us to attack Serbia).
Sometimes the level of reflexive anti-Americanism amazes me.
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Shortwave wouldn't be practical, not enough bandwidth, radio propagation is too variable, storms interfere a lot more with short wave.
;-)
Cellular is one of our six options for data on the road:
1) Call someone and ask him. I usually am in convoy with professional meteorologists and/or researchers, and they often have people they can call. So do I sometimes.
2) Stop at a library and use their high speed connection. Every library in the country apparently has high speed internet. Whenever we have found a library open in any tiny burg (for example, in Vega, TX - look it up if you can find it), they have internet available.
3) Stop at a truck stop, motel or other place where we can plug a land line modem into their phone line. A number of truck stops have phones at the restaurant tables. Besides, truck stops are neat places anyway. Some are now setting up Wi-Fi hotspots, which is even better. Now the truckers can order up their hookers without using the CB
4) Stop at a radio shack that has connectivity, and use their computer.
5) Stop and use the cell phone (it really pays to have free nationwide roaming!) with a cell phone modem. External antenna helps a lot. Amplifier may, although mine seemed to either not work to start with, or pooped out.
6) Try to use the cell phone while in motion (very frustrating, but occasionally you can get in an image or two).
Off the subject of phones, but for those interested in storm chasing, check out the Stormtrack website, which has replaced the eponymous magazine as the central chaser publication. Also the mailing list WX-CHASE is an active on-line chaser community. My own chase logs (not that impressive) are here. 2003 is not yet complete.
"Heavy Weather" was indeed a pretty neat book. Chasing the F-6!
We use FRS, GMRS, CB and ham for intervehicle communications (depending on who has what). We ues cell for talking to other teams farther away, for contacting "nowcasters" - people at home or at work with access to real-time weather data, and we sometimes dial up ISP's using cell phone modems to get the data ourselves.
Actually, I am not maxing out 16mb.
I am considering just giving up on the integrated phone until the market gets straightened out, and just go with two widgets. But in the past I had a PalmV and a small cell phone and carrying both was a nuisance. Also, much easier to forget one of them.
Regarding my objection re: analog. When you get way out in the boondocks, you are still likely to find analog service which you can roam to - if your phone allows it. You are less likely to find your appropriate brand of digital service, since there are three frequency bands and three modulation standards (GSM, CDMA, TDMA) in the US.
Thus analog is a backup that you really want to have if you plan to reliably have service outside of major cities and highways.
The most common crash is when I start the car with the speakerphone adapter turned on. Now, I know, one shouldn't do that. But a modern device like the 6035 *should* have the ability to tolerate power spikes and brownouts... after all, the darn thing has a battery in it!
As far as integration, I may just never have learned how to use it well enough. Also, I have a very early 6035. Is the firmware field upgradable?
An interesting alternative, but only 500 contacts, 250 calendar entries, and 30 to-do list entries? Close, but no Cuban cigar.
Actually, the subject line is an excuse to broaden the subject a bit....
In the US you usually have to buy your phone from your cellular provider (their attempt to reduce churn). Most won't let you just subscribe an existing phone.
So... the question comes up, with the Treo and in my case even more general (say... Kyocera 6035/7135).
Can these phones be hacked to replace a phone that you register? In other words, can I go to XYZ carrier, get one of their dirt cheap little phones, and then hack my fancy organizer-phone to have the same ID, etc as their dirt cheap phone (which I will give to the dog as a play-toy)? I understand the issues of standards (I am unlikely to hack a TDMA 800 phone to work on CDMA until SDR's are used).
Where do I find out about such hacking? Web sites... mailing lists... newsgroups?
I don't want to clone a phone to break the law. I just want my *good* phone to work on a network where the &^%%$#@ supplier won't sell me one!
Yeah... I know. I have a Kyocera 6035. I am, however, not at all happy with it. It does what I need (let me have my palm and phone in one box) but it has poor integration between the functions. It also crashes a lot.
And the other thing stopping me from getting the Kyocera 7135 is that my carrier doesn't support it (grrrrrrrrrrr). I would have to switch carriers and lose my one-number automatic switcheroonie feature (when the cell phone is on, a call to my home office goes there; when it is off, the home office rings. both share the same phone number). Of course, any solution that involves an organizer phone would require me to switch carriers, since QWest supports NO organizer phones (they didn't sell enough and the customer service drove them nuts - they are not what you would call a service oriented company!).
Oh, BTW, did I mention that Qwest Sucks 37800 Times?
I have a deal for the Europeans...
You guys give us your cellular system.
We will stop conquering countries [but you have to do it instead].
I have considered these options.
Two problems:
1) I keep a LOT of data in my palm system. In fact, it is my central organizer of data for my life. Hence, lots of memory is needed. Most phones I have looked at hold far less than I need.
2) Some of that data is quite confidential. I use a Palm aftermarket software (Secret! from http://linkesoft.com/secret/ [I like the software and I the company]). I don't know if I can get equivalent capabilities on non Palm OS's. It sort of like why I run (ugh) Windows as my main desktop - the software I need isn't available under Linux.
3) I use the palm desktop as my organizer on my PC. I don't really want to spend the time trying to write conversion software. [this is the least significant issue, btw]
I would think they could do it with TDOA methods. I know of surveillance systems who use that technique on analogous systems (narrow band FM radio).
Of course, if analog networks go away, the roaming situation gets even worse! At least AMPS is a universal base-level standard in the US.
This comment really applies to the US market mostly:
As a frustrated user of PDA/Phone combos, one thing that is missing from many of these is AMPS (old fashioned US analog service). This means that there are big gaps out in the sticks where no service is available. It also means that it is more difficult to roam with data service, since analog provides a universal carrier for analog cell phone modems while they don't work with digital unless you have digital data service with them.
I live in Phoenix, AZ. We have plenty of service here, but if I drive in any direction from here for more than 30 miles, I am in nowhere land (except along the interstate highways). I don't want to lose cell service there. Furthermore, during my annual storm chasing vacation in the midwest, the situation is even worse.
The other Treo's do not have analog service as far as I can tell. This one doesn't have enough info to tell.
Naturally, this is also a good place to rant about US cellular service provider issues in general. Buy your Treo and you probably have to get it from a service provider. Just taking one to a compatible service provider will, if my experience is any guide, get you the answer that "we only support phones that you buy from us."
Not "we only support the kind of phones that we sell" but "you have to buy the phone from us or screw you."
Sigh.
I am almost ready to give up, buy a little palm that is not a cell phone, and go with the flow and buy stupid little cell phones separately - carrying two around (as opposed to my current Kyocera 6035 Palm/CDMA cell phone).
Edwin, I think that most people do mistakenly conflate nuclear power and nuclear weapons. I know that anti-nuclear activists intentionally mislead people about the connection, along with misleading them about the potential dangers and benefits of both nuclear power and nuclear weapons (which are invariable treated as bad under all circumstances).
The issue in India, which is quite interesting and new to me, is probably beside the point, since it is a localized political phenomenon. However, even without that I would suspect that India would have gone nuclear eventually. It is a major geopolitical power, and nuclear status is commensurate with the resulting challenges - especially balance with China, and the threat from Pakistan.
You are certainly right, of course, to consider the vulnerability to terrorism of any nuclear facility. In fact, today in modern countries, terrorism is probably the only valid argument against nuclear power - it is certainly a factor that one would have to consider.
As a member of the generation who grew up then, I can say that the government in fact did not try to scare people about radioactivity. Rather, they were promoting nuclear power plants, nuclear bombers, nuclear rockets, etc.
The energy companies profit no matter which source we use. They aren't dumb - if we move towards nuclear, they invest in nuclear.
And we hardly needed radioactivity to convince us of the dangers of communism. Certainly atomic bombs were scary, but it wasn't radioactivity that most people focused on - it was being blown up. That communism was extremely dangerous was obvious to anyone who bothered to study it, and should be much more obvious now that much more information has come out.
I hardly think what we heard from the government in the '50s and '60s was brainwashing. In fact, most of it wasn't even propaganda (which is a lot short of brainwashing).
The people spreading false propaganda about radiation are radical environmentalists - ironically many of whom were communists or extreme leftists in earlier years. They will tell any lie to defeat nuclear power, because nuclear power does away with so many of their favorite fund-raising, regulation increasing causes: pollution and global warming.
Since the reactor will not be activated until the spacecraft has safely left the earth, the potential radiation hazard is essentially zero. The only significant radioactive elements in the propulsion system are Uranium isotopes, which are widely found in nature and which, if dispersed in the atmosphere, would increase the current radiation level on earth by EXACTLY ZERO.
Hence increased public scrutiny is silly, but of course the usually ignoramuses will raise all sorts of flack. To many, their god is the nature and their devil is radiation!
See here for some demystifying of radiation and nuclear weapons.
From that same National Human Radiobiology Tissue Repository:
The health effects from plutonium, americium, and uranium intakes by humans, as determined with USTUR data can be summarized in two words, virtually none. A study of the causes of death of USTUR organ donors has been completed. The study showed that the vast majority of USTUR donors died from the same diseases that have caused the deaths of most of the U. S. population, heart disease, strokes, and cancers not necessarily associated with radiation exposure. This is in spite of the fact that the USTUR donors are a biased population in that a number of donors volunteered for the program after having been diagnosed with cancer. The average age at death of USTUR registrants is 63 years (range between 25 and 91 years). The average age of USTUR registrants who are still living is 73 years (range between 30 and 93 years).
[bold emphasis added]
In this case, unlikely the satellites, the rocket will contain only uranium, not highly radioactive reactor products.
In the past, Plutonium batteries have been used in spacecraft without incident. The russian satellites that came back down had reactors that had been running for a long time, and thus had short lived very hot isotopes in them, but nobody was injured by it.
Why is everyone so afraid of a little bit of radioactivity? Folks, especially slashdotters with the capability to read technical stuff and work with powers of ten, should just look at the issue a bit.
Radioactive material is toxic. So is rocket exhaust. So are zillions of other things in our environment, including all sorts of natural stuff in our food and our air. There is nothing magic or mysterious about radioactivity toxicity.
Your smoke detector contains a radioactive pellet. If you don't eat the thing, you are fine. Even if you do, you are probably okay (if a bit crazy). Dust contains radioactive materials. A large number of nuclear bombs have been exploded in the atmosphere, release lots of plutonium and other radioactive elements (the things are nowhere close to 100% efficient). We are still alive. Phosphorous products often have a raised level of radioactivity. If you are a camper with a Coleman lantern, the lantern mantles are radioactive. If you fly in an airplane or go to high altitudes (Denver, anyone), you are exposed to a lot of ionizing radiation (compared to sea level). Like getting a tan? You get it from ionizing radiation( UV rays).
Unless you are a fool, you wouldn't eat a gram of cyanide. Likewise, I wouldn't recommend eating a gram of a space probe's nuclear reactor. But that isn't going to happen!
Even if all the material were released into the environment (which is highly unlikely), the chances of harm to any one person are extremely low. You would experience far more danger driving to see the launch or just plugging in your computer!
Since the reactor is not activated until it is well away from earth, at launch it contains only uranium. Uranium is all over the place. Here in the Phoenix, AZ area there are significant concentrations in the soil in many areas where people live. My geiger counter gets 26 counts per minute in my driveway, but only 16 counts if it is sitting on top of the engine block of my car in the driveway. Wow! My driveway is radioactive. I guess I am doomed!
The uranium in a never fired nuclear reactor is no more dangerous than the uranium in soil - it is just more concentrated and has a different isotopic ratio (enriched reactor uranium is not more radioactive than unenriched - it just has a more U-235 (and less U-238). If it is dispersed in an explosion, it is no more dangerous than a dust storm here in this large metropolian area!
Anti-nuclear activists, a totally innumerate and scientifically ignorant press, the irrational conflation of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, and the unwillingness of people to look seriously at the issue have created a nuclear phobia in much of the western world.
Maybe I'm just dumb or not reading the right stuff, but what gives with Sun and Java?
Does Sun actually make money with Java? If so, how? How much?
If Sun goes into the toilet, what happens to all of us who build our applications in Java?
KU is not a business, and it can do all sorts of things that consumers would reject.
I think the charging model of the future is tiered service, not per-usage billing.
Consumers don't like usage billing. If you don't believe me, notice how the cell phone companies in the US use "free one gazillion minutes on weekends and blue moon days" as their major enticement in their ads. Furthermore, local cell service is now often sold with unlimited time for local use (to compete directly with land lines).
Off the subject... back when I was at KU, we had a program that got into master mode on the main computer (actually, one of only two, but that was a LONG time ago - 1970) and reset the billing whenever we threatened to run out of our usage time. Hee hee.
And in those days, it was even legal.
As a storm chaser techie, what I need is high bandwidth internet connections in Nowhere, Nebraska and Outback, Oklahoma. You wouldn't believe the lengths storm chasers go to for good data! Imagine a van with DirectWay on the roof - yep... it's out there chasing tornados.
Of course, we are hardly an interesting market to mobile phone providers... but hey, please waste the resources, just for us.
By far the largest spending by the US government is in income transfer or in-kind payments of one sort or another - in other words, social welfare spending - just like in Europe.
The government pays Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid (if you are truly poor in the US, your health care is free - no matter what the Europeans say), housing for the poor, hundreds of silly programs to help the poor that end up discouraging them from helping themselves, enormous education costs that produce poorly educated people (the US is not very good at socialized systems like public education), food programs for the poor, child care programs for the poor, etc. Our government funds a huge percentage of the scientific research in the world, and our private industry funds much of the rest of medical research. And, of course, we waste vast amounts of money subsidizing farmers, just like Europe does. There are now more employees in the US Department of Agriculture than there are farmers in the country.
Corruption will happen in any government, one way or another. Americans actually have one of the least corrupt governments in the world, overall. If you really want to see corruption in action in a (barely still) first world country, look at France. Most of the second, third and fourth world are far worse. One reason many Americans are distrustful of big government is that we know it will be inefficient and corrupt.
Although our defense spending is higher than anyone else in the world (SOMEBODY has to take the responsibility for dealing with evildoers), it is still a tiny part of our GDP and is historically lower than it has been in the last 60 years.
FORTH!
) about 20 years ago, and he used FORTH.
A friend of mine did guidance for Project Private Enterprise (Bob Truax's launch-a-small-crazy-human-into-sub-orbital-space
Having also used it extensively, I would say that it is a much better software package for development of an integrated, time-sensitive control system of this sort than most other modern software systems. You usually don't need much of an OS for a rocket! You need a real time kernel, and a lot of real time math.
Clearly they need to install shielding
Much easier said than done! There are miles of wire. Any break in the shielding can be enough to cause problems. Any corrosion can too.
Furthermore, the phone can cause interference by other processes, for example:
Your phone starts transmitting. It is at high power because it is hearing a weak signal. It's signal gets into your walkman via the headphone cable. Another signal, perhaps from a radio on the aircraft or another cell phone or whatever, also gets into that same cable. The two mix because the walkman is non-linear at those frequencies. The result is on the radio communications frequency, the ILS (Instrument Landing System) frequency, or GPS band.
In general, this whole thing is about incrementally improving safety. The odds of a single cell phone on a single flight causing a crash are very low. But the odds get much larger when you are talking millions of cell phones on hundreds of thousands of flights.
Even then, the cell phone may just *contribute* to an accident. Most commercial air crashes are a result of a cascade of individually recoverable failures or events. The cell phone may simply take out a backup system at a critical time, or it may interfere with a primary system (say, glideslope) while the pilot is distracted by another urgency.
For those who comment about how the presumably more susceptible legacy systems on the aircraft should be replaced... the systems mentioned include such minor systems as the only air-to-ground communications mechanism used for air traffic control, and the only instrument landing system available for many airports. Replacing this "legacy" infrastructure would require replacing every aircraft radio in every aircraft, control tower, air traffic center, etc in the world, and replacing all of the Instrument Landing Systems.
This is not trivial. Furthermore, in aircraft, it is not a good idea to rapidly replace systems that have been working and safe!
There are two aspects to this observation - one sort of reasonable, one not.
First of all, the phone signal is easily strong enough to reach hundreds of kilometers from high altitude. Cell phones transmit several hundred milliwatts of power. I once used a 100 mW ham radio mountaintop-to-mountaintop at a distance of 175 miles. Since 30,000 feet is onloy 6 miles, signal strength per se is not going to keep your cell phone from working.
Then there is the issue of antennae. The cell system antennas are oriented to maximize signal towards or below the horizon. Thus a signal from a high angle will be somewhat attenuated. Also, the shielding of the aircraft body will also attenuate the signal.
Overall, if you operate a cell phone in an aircraft, it is likely to interfere with a number of cell sites.
Then there is the problem of cities with hills or mountains in them. I live about 500 feet above average terrain in the Phoenix, AZ area. I have had a number of weird cell phone effects as a result. Cell service at my house is sporadic. I can start a call from down on the flat and it will carry most of the way home and then be lost. If I start a call at home it will be lost very quickly!
The reason appears to be that as I drive to my home, my signal is first strongest towards cell towers far to my southeast, and then I go around a corner and they are suddenly only good to the southwest. I don't think the system can handle a switch from a cell to one several cells away.
The reason appears to be the business models followed by the carriers. They can do this because the FCC decided to use much less regulation in cellular phone service (starting with PCS) than it did in the past. [As a side note, if you are an Open Spectrum advocate, you should love our current cellular system!]
I used to be able to move a phone from one carrier to another as long as they were technically compatible. Now that isn't possible. Either the old carrier won't release the unlock codes to *my* phone or the new one won't accept it. They also don't wan't me to be able to move my phone number. This same sort of thinking will make it difficult to get universal instant messaging or many other advanced services.
The companies are trying to increase the friction in competition - making it more expensive or harder for customers to move from one company to another (churn). They imagine that this is in their benefit (and it is, in the short term, for the current winners). It is certainly in the interest of cell phone manufacturers (only one of whom is American, BTW), because when you switch carriers, you have to buy a new phone.
From the point of view of a cell phone service provider, they are selling you a vertically integrated package: a wireless telephone, the service to use it on, and a telephone number, and whatever proprietary incompatible service they can dream up (photography, instant messaging, etc). This was the same vision that computer companies had prior to the internet... you not only bought your computer from them... you also bought your remote computers and the data communications protocol between them.
The mess in the US has actually benefited the rest of the world, because different companies have tried a number of different technologies (7 different standards by my last count). This was probably responsible for CDMA becoming the preferred standard for next generation almost worldwide.
If the FCC has forced a single standard (like was done in most countries), TDMA would have been the result, for various reasons not worth getting into here.
As technical people, we recognize that interoperability and portability are optimal. But the average consumer does not. However, this one issue (portable phone numbers) is directly visible to them, so it is not surprising that it is the first to be regulated.
Once the cell phone providers get serious about advanced services (text and picture messaging, etc), they will encounter consumer resistance to their current plans. Who is going to want to buy an expensive, fancy phone if they can only communicate voice with anyone not on their carrier, and if they need to buy a different one to move to another carrier? Why buy text messaging unless it is universal (that one, via internet portals, is much closer to reality, but not by the intent of the carriers)?
As a side note... I have a Kyocera 6035 which I paid a bundle for. I really want a cell-phone/organizer combo, and I'd like a new, smaller one. Unfortunately, different phone vendors accept different ones, and only a few provide true roaming (BEWARE... if you buy some of these slick Palm OS or Windows-something phones, you won't be able to talk to ANYONE when you are out in the boondocks - they don't do analog AMPS phone). Kyocera has a new, better version, the 7135 (or something like that). It is compatible with my current carrier (Qwest), but THEY WON'T LET ME USE ONE! They don't sell them, don't want to sell them, and won't let me use one if I buy it elsewhere.
Sigh. Europe wins when it comes to mobile phone service!
It would be really, really stupid for the US not to have a program for dominating space, given that it has the capability in every other theater of war, and more and more of that capability depends upon space based technology. And longtime allies can become enemies or can assist enemies (you only need a two month long memory to know that).
Those who think the US is evil or a big ogre for this have little concept of the difference between the actuality of conflict of national interest and the non-existence of some marvelous, peace-loving big momma world government.
The purpose of the US military is to defend the US. We are the most likely target (largest economy, natural focus for hatred from any dissatisified group anywhere, reluctant world policeman).
But I suppose we should do as implied by all the highly moderated posts in this thread... NOT protect our GPS assets from hostile threats, and NOT be able to deny accurate space-based navigation to potential hostiles.
Then France will sell the next nuclear armed tyrant a nice guidance system for WMD's, which he will provide to nameless terrorists who will use it to kill even more Americans than on 9-11.
Yeah... that's a clever strategy. It's like coating yourself in money and walking around blindfolded in a bad part of town! Real smart!
And of course nobody will complain when our GPS is disabled and we have to use dumb bombs in large numbers, causing huge amounts of collateral damage, the next time we or someone else is threatened (remember, we also used smart bombs when Europe came begging for us to attack Serbia).
Sometimes the level of reflexive anti-Americanism amazes me.