I don't know why I bother, but you seem sorely in need of education.
The "shortage of spectrum" is not "just politics." It is a fact. There is a finite amount of bandwidth which is suitable for mobile phones. Above a certain frequency, antenna directivity is too high (or capture area too small - your choice) for mobile operation. Competing for the mobile spectrum are vast numbers of services - more than can be accomodated by simply throwing all frequencies wide open. It may be true that non-optimal use of spectrum is a result of politics (i.e. too much for broadcast TV), but it is a *fact* that spectrum is a strictly limited resource. It is like beach-front property. It doesn't make any difference what the politics are, there are only so many milies of beach! Actually, it is worse - you can build more beach. You cannot build more spectrum.
As far as interference, to a radio design professional (which I have been), interference is any signal which might reduce reception. Whether it is from the system you are designing or from some other system is only a factor of the interference. The reason one cares about spectral efficiency is because of interference from stations within one's service (assuming one has dedicated frequencies) and to avoid interference from other services (spectral efficiency allows them to have their own spectrum).
Some people imagine that there are technologies that would allow everyone to share spectrum without regulation. For example, ultra-wide-band proponents sometims make this claim. But the laws of physics are against them. UWB causes interference across a broad frequency range, but it is of a slightly different characteristic than wide band spread spectrum.
Noise, to any professional, is very different from interference. Noise is a result of random, usually natural processes and has a noise spectrum (broadband, random). Noise can never be totally eliminated because all matter radiates noise, and all processing increases noise.
I can only infer from the way you use terminology that you are not familiar with the field, which leads one to wonder why you are so confident of your assertions when you are so obviously ignorant!
I think that particular one is because folks, like myself, use the word "site" so often that our fingers automagically type it.
I certainly know the right spelling, and I also notice it all the time, and yet as you point out, I did it in my own post. I hate a lot of the spelling and grammar mistakes on the net, but no point in flaming it!
Yep. The problem is that I have snakes here, and they haven't solved the rats.
Rat poison does, although the odor isn't too good for a few days afterwards, and the protectors of raptors in the neighborhood object to it because the rats might leave the house and become subject to predation.
Well, there are lots of snakes in the neighborhood also. In fact, my dog stepped on a rattlesnake in the back yard last year. Fortunately neither noticed the other, so no damage done. But there is a basic ecological problem with this solution: there has to be a stable population of rats to maintain a stable population of snakes, and the only thing the rats can eat is my phone lines!
BTW... do you know what it is like to live in a house with a recently dead snake in the walls?:-)
I purchased a TeleZapper some months back. I was seriously skeptical, but I figured it would take the chance.
The device apparently works by sending a fax answer tone when you pick up the tone. A lot of telemarketing dialers do in fact hang up when they get this tone - I guess they don't want to talk to a FAX:-) They also seem to remove the number from their lists, as the number of these calls has gone way, way down.
I live in a desert area that has lots of pack rats. These critters love to eat the phone wire insulation, and are quite adept at getting into my attic and walls and doing so.
I have thus had the phone company out several times to repair the wiring. Having previously done it myself, and also having paid someone else to do so, in this case the insurance is worth it.
I am trying to keep the rats out. If after some months my attick remains pack rat free, I will probably cancel the insurance.
Many years ago, my family was driving from El Paso, TX to Albuquerque, NM, when we saw a number of fireballs. The first occurred just after sunset, was visually a large, bright green glowing object leaving a smoke trail. It traveled east to west and lasted about 10 seconds, then broke up into two pieces and disappeared. We were just north of El Paso, and were listening to KOMA in Oklahoma, City - there were many reports called in to them from many states.
As the drive continued, we saw about 6 more fireballs, all red, all running east to west, through the rest of the evening.
Quite a show. The clear and thin high altitude air of the rockies, along with the lack of city lights, makes these sitings a lot more common in those areas.
Sign. So, when the spectral efficiency is not as good, just allocate a bit more frequency and the same amount of channels can be served...
You seem to be unaware of the extreme shortage of spectrum. Saying "Just allocate a bit more frequency" is like saying "just give them a bit more beach front property." Spectrum is rare and expensive. Spectral efficiency is important because of that.
Not if you have some more frequencies for your system. Duh. Of course, if you have more frequencies, you had to get them somehow. Did you grow them on trees? Win them in a lottery? Get a clue!
"Interference *is* the issue of spectral efficiency!"
No it is not. Bandwidth restrictions is The reason people care about spectral efficiency is interference. If you had no interference, you could run an infinite number of stations on the same channel. But because of interference, you are forced to chose modulation schemes which minimize the interference - which is to say, those schemes which allow the greatest number of transmitters on the same frequency without degraded performance due to interference.
NONSENSE! Spectral efficiency cannot be fixed by allocating more bandwidth! Spectral efficiency *is* the ratio of information rate divided by bandwidth.
More importantly, in the case of cellular and other systems, is spectral efficiency per area used, or put another way, the number of simultaneous users you can have per megahertz per square kilometer.
Spectral efficiency is extremely important. But of course other factors are also important. However, DSS modulation is already known to be better at multipath rejection (what you call holes). Interference *is* the issue of spectral efficiency!
This does not change the import of what I am saying. Their practices to hold onto customers, which include not giving the codes, but also other things, result in a system that is inferior in all ways but technical to the European system.
I have a CDMA phone in the US. I used to use it on Sprint. I went to another carrier that also uses CDMA, but I couldn't use the phone! Why? Because Sprint refused to release the unlock codes for the phone!
IOW, the technical standards aren't enough for a successful system. The carriers also need to realize that their current business practices are retarding the development of good cellular services in the US. In order to reduce churn (people moving from one system to another), they intentionally throw up compatibility problems - such as I described above. They *like* the fact that I have to buy a new phone to use one of their competitors. I currently have contracts with four cellular companies, and every one requires a different phone! This is *not* really a technical issue, as some of those phones operate in 3 different modes!
Then there is the issue of roaming. Does anyone imagine that roaming in the US is anything other than a method to seriously soak the traveler? Of course, if you have the "right" plan, and you roam to your own carriers' network (a couple of exceptions apply), you don't pay the huge roaming charges (often 60-90 cents per minute). If you travel to rural areas (as I do when tornado chasing), this is a huge issue.
The free market in the US did indeed allow the best technology to evolve, and the anti-free market posts in this discussion seem to be ideologically driven rather than fact driven in this regard.
Unfortunately, that market has so far produced an inferior business model where the phones don't operate across multiple systems; where advanced services (such as messaging) likewise are proprietary; where vendors strive for unique (incompatible) services in order to take market share; where there is great waste as each of a number of providers has to provision the same geographical area.
Overall, my take is that the US has used the power of the free market to allow the best technology to be proven, to the advantage of the rest of the world and at great cost to America!
The issue that was debated was the spectral efficiency of CDMA, which I am sure is what the author meant. Everyone knew that Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (of which CDMA is a subset) works. But nobody could prove that CDMA, in the real world, could work as well as TDMA and provide better spectral efficiencies. There were many very serious people involved in this issue, but ultimately it took real world operational tests, not theory, to prove out CDMA.
Next I suppose we will have a lawsuit from a visually challenged person that they cannot get proper access to a pr0n site. The court will rule that the site must provide blow-up dolls hooked to the web browser and controlled by Javascript for the poor guy.
Long ago, a science fiction writer (I don't remember who, unfortunately) wrote a short story about a society which tried to equalize everything for everybody. If you were too fast, you wore weights to slow you down. If you were too smart, you wore a device that randomly made a loud noise and startled you out of your train of thought.
Has it ever occurred to you that a paper on properly done research may not be applicable to every possible situation? That there are not only variations in situation, but also in individuals?
I don't have to read Bill Buxton's paper to know that track balls work better for me, for what I do. After all, I am quite capable of carrying out the experiment myself, and have done so.
For you to continue arguing, you will find yourself in the position of asserting that a mouse is better than a trackball for my situation, since that is what I have been talking about. Somehow I doubt that you really would like to assert that.
There was nothing in his paper that addressed my particular situation. It is utterly irrelevant that a mouse is superior to a trackball for the tested circumstances, isn't it?
It has a low population density, but it is *far* from unpopulated! Don't forget all the Texas nationalists hiding out in the Guadalupe Mountains nearby!
I have to drive through the Town of Paradise Valley, AZ to get anywhere from my home. I also get a copy of their newspaper.
Paradise Valley (a Phoenix suburb) was the first city in the US to use photo-radar. And in spite of the gunfire attack on it (mentioned in the referenced article) they still operate it every day from small SUV's. They have also installed a stop-light system.
What makes their photo-radar so objectionable is that PV has lower speed limits on through streets through this little town than adjoining cities have on the same streets - even though the streets in PV are *safer* to go fast on. The speed limit on four lane divided road with relatively few side roads is 40mph. In Phoenix, it is 45 on the same roads. PV also has along standing attitude (it is the richest community in Arizona) that folks from other towns shouldn't drive through PV (even though it squats on two im-portant mountain passes in the middle of the metro area.
When the PV photo radar is challenged, they fight just long enough to make the costs more than the cost of the ticket, but always give in before an appeal which could rule it illegal!
The radars are operated by a vendor who gets a cut in the proceeds. I believe that the reason they have to have a person in the vehicle with the radar is to prevent the radar from being destroyed.
There is no doubt in my mind that the only purposes of the radars are:
1 - to discourage people from driving through the town
2 - to enhance town revenues
Oh, BTW... radar detectors are useless against the speed radar. It runs extremely low power and looks at traffic from a 22.5 degree angle. You *might* get one signal out of the detector if you are right behind someone who gets hit. Otherwise, no luck.
Many people here warn other motorists in oncoming lanes by flashing their lights after passing the radar. I wish more did.
Actually, my armchair rationalization is also informed by my experience of some years as a consultant to the military in the human factors area. One thing I learned is how much BS is published in the field.
The paper may indeed show that the next time I am marking pie menus, I may want to use a mouse. Of course, this is assuming the research is valid and replicable, and more important - applies to me - a specific individual with specific physical and mental characteristics, which is my point. Humans are variable.
Regardless of what the research shows for the specific subjects selected to do the specific task in the research, the Kensington Expert Mouse trackball that I use works better, for this individual human, doing what this particular human does with a pointing device, than a mouse does.
If I want to sign my name on the screen, I'll use a mouse. If I want to use a pie menu, maybe I'll use a mouse for that.
it has already been determined that "terrorists" did not and generally dont use crypto for communication, so thats just a lame excuse to keep the tools crippled
And how exactly was this determined? This makes the assumption that:
(a) We know how all terrorists communicate.
(b) All terrorists are idiots.
Of course terrorists do and will use crypto where it suits their purposes. Organized terrorists in general tend to be a lot smarter than organized criminals. And organized criminals *do* use crypto - especially large scale drug smugglers.
Now, this does not mean that crypto should (or can be) illegal.
And? You don't know the future until it is too late. Which, of course, is the whole point of futures contracts. They allow people to produce products before the demand is assured.
But then those "future contracts" will have a premium, like insurrance contracts. And government subsidies don't hvae a premium? Be serious. Government subsidies are incredibly inefficient when operated for reasonable purposes. But in democracies, they tend to be operated to benefit producers, not the country in general. They have *huge* costs.
For the average Third World citizen, the prices *WILL* skyrocket on the bad years in any case - something that a responsible governement cannot allow. The agriculture is just the most random industry. And why should the prices skyrocket for the third world and not for the first world? In a free market, this won't happen. And, of course, if we didn't have agricultural subsidies distorting the markets, there would be more production in the third world countries to begin with!
The governements subsidy production. This is, in effect, favoring the "invention of goods where there are none". Of course, they also handle the management of overproduction and destruction the extra goods of the good years, to prevent farmers to be bankrupt in those good years.
My goodness... how wise those bureaucrats must be! And why destroy the extra goods, rather than ship them to the third world where *they are needed!* Before, you were bewailing the effects of the free market on third world people's, and here you are advocating destruction of food, even though *every* year there are those who go hungry in the third world. Me thinks you are not very consistent.
No they don't have food shortages
So why do you bring them up in a discussion of food shortages??? It would appear that you have a general agenda to trash markets and blame the worlds' problems on them.
the countries are wise enough to have in general 90% or more of their food consumption provided by themselves, including US and EU. Argentinians can still eat, thanks god.
Wise? Or lucky?
"Temporary economic downturns" ??? In which world do you live? For instance, take the Mexican crisis, "most Mexicans were immediately 20-30% poorer in 1995 than in 1994" - it's not the "US/EU market crisis" where the stocks collapses but the growth is still here, it's real economic and industrial crisis.
Whenever someone picks two years out of a century or two of possible data in order to support their argument, it is likely that those two years are anomolous. This was pointed out, and numerous examples given, in The Skeptical Environmentalist. So why should I make any conclusions because there was a disruption in Mexico between 1994 and 1995? And to what do you attribute that disruption? Could it have been government action? Or was it somehow the "free" market (which barely exists in Mexico due to extreme corruption). Why do you even bother to mention such an out-of-context, contrived statistic?
Living a few miles from Mexico, I follow their politics fairly closely and travel there frequently. I have done business with Mexican entities and witnessed the corruption . Mexico has endemic corruption at all levels of government, with extreme governmental meddling in the economy, which is the main reason that so many Mexicans risk their lives to get into the US every year - our lower level of corruption has produced economic miracles.
BTW... Mexico is a great example. Mexico has vast natural resources and is a major oil producer. It has a populace with a strong work ethic. It has a free trade agreement with the nation with the largest market on earth. It has *no* excuses for its laggard economic performance. The *only* cause is corruption. Why your would bring it up in what obviously is an attack on free markets is beyond me!
[re Asia] That's possible, but it was created when the foreign countries withdrew massively their investments, and although those countries would had enough savings themselves to otherwise fund those.
Possible? It's true. And why did the foreign countries withdraw their investments? Could it be that those were bad investments? Duh!
For Japan, it is partly created by the current governement (or rather the economic culture) - but on the other hand, it's this very same way to organize industry and banks which made Japan so successful 1970-1980.
Your point? This seems to have drifted far from agricultural subsidies. In any case, Japan is a good example of how government can screw things up. If they had a less corrupt and more flexible system, it would have adapted when the export driven model failed. Instead, they are locked into their old policies after they are no longer profitable. BTW, my brother owns a business in Japan that is part of one of the major Kereitsu's (sp?), and has added to the knowledge of this I have gained from reading about it. Japanese agricultural subsidies also cause significant disruptions in their economy - primarily by creating artificial shortages of land.
For Russia as for many third world countries, it is in part created by the governement actions ; simply free market (i.e. heavily dependance on imports and exports) which is very instable, and make small mismanagement explode in huge crisis - especially since they don't have much control on their currency (as opposed to US and EU).
In every third world country that I am aware of, governmental corruption (often enhanced by misguided policies of the IMF and World Bank) is the root cause of their failure to thrive economically.
Countries with even slightly reasonable policies do well.
Russia is a special case, because it was a second world country recently, and because it went through a sudden collapse of the existing (highly inefficient) communist system that caused a larger than normal level of corruption - a level so high that it is dangerous to do business there because violent crime is part of business for too many.
[stockpiles vs subsidies]
Sorry, but the second amounts to the first. For instance, EU doesn't subdisise quite a number of type of foods (EU subsidises on export), and de facto is just keeping this food for its own market. You just can't store 3 months of food like that.
Sure, those Western Countries would *love* to depend heavily on other countries for the most vital good there is ; you thought OPEP and oil shock was bad enough? Just wait for the "Big Hunger" - after all, if one country want to stop its exports to another for political reasons, this is a free market, you can't force them to do so, right? And just wait, there is a war between a big-exporter-India and Pakistan - or even only war threats. It's not like Western Countries couldn't afford overpriced but guaranteed food.
You raise the only valid reason for government action in agriculture: national security. But the subsidies programs are far different from what would be necessary for national security. I agree that governments should supplement the market in maintaining stockpiles of critical supplies. But they could do that by buying on the open market.
As far as the argument that countries could simply stop food shipments... this is really rather silly for several reasons:
1) It takes more than food in big storage houses in order to be fed. It takes energy (oil) to move that food, and to produce additional food. Thus a shutoff of oil would cause a food shortage just as much as a shutoff of food would. 2) There are many countries capable of producing food - many more than can produce oil. They aren't all going to shut off food.
3) First world countries are dependent for their economy, and ultimately their critical life supporting infrastructures, on many other countries. For example, almost all chromium comes from one or two countries in Africa. So we are already in an interdependent world. There is no reason to make a special case of food - a modern civilization needs a lot more than food in order for most of its citizens to survive.
3) The government stockpile systems would contract long term for food.
4) If a country cut off contracted-for food for political reasons, it would amount to an act of war (political cutoffs amount to embargos and are not the acts of a free market as you imply). The US at least has kept a military sufficient to guarantee the supply of food.
This is stupid. The market is extremely adaptable, but can't do wonders. You see, it takes 6 months to 1 year to grow crops.
Gee... I thought the just appeared in the grocery store by magic!
If the production isn't here, your free market will just make the prices skyrocket. It can't invent goods were there are none.
Stupid? Have you ever heard of futures contracts? I figured not. Do you really think that the supply and demand side of the food business operates only in real time? The food markets have mechanisms in place for dealing with future demand, not just current demand. It would indeed be stupid to only use the spot market, but *real* markets don't work that way. Farmers and those who store commodities plan ahead! If they don't, they go out of business.
BTW... If you think that farmers cannot invent goods when there are none, how are governments going to do that?
Free markets don't prevent crisis. In fact they tend to create bigger crisis (like the 5 or 6 major ones there have been in the 10 last years - Asian countries, Mexico, Russia, Argentina/South America,... and now Western Countries) - that's why governements subsidy.
Just exactly which crisis are you talking about? Those areas don't have food shortages! Most of those areas don't have crises at all. Or do you think that temporary economic downturns amount to crises?
Russia certainly has a crisis, but it isn't caused by free markets. It is caused by an economic system that is extremely corrupt (free markets don't work if there is too much corruption). The corruption is due to lingering power held by former communist bosses, and the lack of respect for law and order by them and others. Russia also is suffering from severe misallocations of labor and capital due to 70 years of central government control of the economy. It also has severe social problems, an overhang from the collapse of communism and the destruction of public confidence.
The crises in the Asian countries are due primarily to "industrial policy" - where the governments, in their infinite wisdom, "guide" the investments. Guess what! They guided wrong.
The long term crisis in Japan is caused by severe corruption in government, severe private corruption (bank owning stock in those they lend to, as an example), industrial policy, and the unwillingness of the government to let failed companies and banks fail. If they did the latter (and they are finally starting to), much of the locked up investment potential would be released and they would start to recover. They would do even better if they cleaned up the governmental corruption (which is much harder - the bureaucracy in Japan is extremely powerful compared to the elected leaders, and is extremely intertwined with big business).
While it may make sense for governments to maintain stockpiles of food for extreme emergencies, it does not make any sense for them to maintain the kind of farm subsidies we see today. Those subsidies exist for one purpose: to protect western farmers from competition from farmers in the poor countries, and from competition from each other. This has the effect of increasing poverty in third world countries for the sole benefit of the relatively small number of people in the western world who are farmers.
In addition to elaborate subsidies, there are elaborate systems of price and supply controls which serve to *reduce* the amount of food produced and to transfer wealth from consumers of food to producers of food. This is true both in the US and in Western Europe.
It seems that every news article about weather events these days mentions a possible connection to climate change! Has it occurred to anyone that since there is a lot of money for climate change research, scientists, in response to the inevitable reporter question, will of course say it *might* have something to do with climate change.
It is time for a new fear. Climate change is getting trite!
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why I bother, but you seem sorely in need of education.
The "shortage of spectrum" is not "just politics." It is a fact. There is a finite amount of bandwidth which is suitable for mobile phones. Above a certain frequency, antenna directivity is too high (or capture area too small - your choice) for mobile operation. Competing for the mobile spectrum are vast numbers of services - more than can be accomodated by simply throwing all frequencies wide open. It may be true that non-optimal use of spectrum is a result of politics (i.e. too much for broadcast TV), but it is a *fact* that spectrum is a strictly limited resource. It is like beach-front property. It doesn't make any difference what the politics are, there are only so many milies of beach! Actually, it is worse - you can build more beach. You cannot build more spectrum.
As far as interference, to a radio design professional (which I have been), interference is any signal which might reduce reception. Whether it is from the system you are designing or from some other system is only a factor of the interference. The reason one cares about spectral efficiency is because of interference from stations within one's service (assuming one has dedicated frequencies) and to avoid interference from other services (spectral efficiency allows them to have their own spectrum).
Some people imagine that there are technologies that would allow everyone to share spectrum without regulation. For example, ultra-wide-band proponents sometims make this claim. But the laws of physics are against them. UWB causes interference across a broad frequency range, but it is of a slightly different characteristic than wide band spread spectrum.
Noise, to any professional, is very different from interference. Noise is a result of random, usually natural processes and has a noise spectrum (broadband, random). Noise can never be totally eliminated because all matter radiates noise, and all processing increases noise.
I can only infer from the way you use terminology that you are not familiar with the field, which leads one to wonder why you are so confident of your assertions when you are so obviously ignorant!
I think that particular one is because folks, like myself, use the word "site" so often that our fingers automagically type it.
I certainly know the right spelling, and I also notice it all the time, and yet as you point out, I did it in my own post. I hate a lot of the spelling and grammar mistakes on the net, but no point in flaming it!
Errr... what's a BEM? Big Evil Monster?
Yep. The problem is that I have snakes here, and they haven't solved the rats.
Rat poison does, although the odor isn't too good for a few days afterwards, and the protectors of raptors in the neighborhood object to it because the rats might leave the house and become subject to predation.
Oh well.
Well, there are lots of snakes in the neighborhood also. In fact, my dog stepped on a rattlesnake in the back yard last year. Fortunately neither noticed the other, so no damage done. But there is a basic ecological problem with this solution: there has to be a stable population of rats to maintain a stable population of snakes, and the only thing the rats can eat is my phone lines!
:-)
BTW... do you know what it is like to live in a house with a recently dead snake in the walls?
I purchased a TeleZapper some months back. I was seriously skeptical, but I figured it would take the chance.
:-) They also seem to remove the number from their lists, as the number of these calls has gone way, way down.
The device apparently works by sending a fax answer tone when you pick up the tone. A lot of telemarketing dialers do in fact hang up when they get this tone - I guess they don't want to talk to a FAX
Sometimes this is useful!
I live in a desert area that has lots of pack rats. These critters love to eat the phone wire insulation, and are quite adept at getting into my attic and walls and doing so.
I have thus had the phone company out several times to repair the wiring. Having previously done it myself, and also having paid someone else to do so, in this case the insurance is worth it.
I am trying to keep the rats out. If after some months my attick remains pack rat free, I will probably cancel the insurance.
No, it wasn't that. There were very few typical meteors that night - mostly red fireballs.
The Leonids would have had lots and lots of typical "streak" meteors.
Many years ago, my family was driving from El Paso, TX to Albuquerque, NM, when we saw a number of fireballs. The first occurred just after sunset, was visually a large, bright green glowing object leaving a smoke trail. It traveled east to west and lasted about 10 seconds, then broke up into two pieces and disappeared. We were just north of El Paso, and were listening to KOMA in Oklahoma, City - there were many reports called in to them from many states.
As the drive continued, we saw about 6 more fireballs, all red, all running east to west, through the rest of the evening.
Quite a show. The clear and thin high altitude air of the rockies, along with the lack of city lights, makes these sitings a lot more common in those areas.
We didn't see any LGM, however.
Sign. So, when the spectral efficiency is not as good, just allocate a bit more frequency and the same amount of channels can be served...
You seem to be unaware of the extreme shortage of spectrum. Saying "Just allocate a bit more frequency" is like saying "just give them a bit more beach front property." Spectrum is rare and expensive. Spectral efficiency is important because of that.
Not if you have some more frequencies for your system.
Duh. Of course, if you have more frequencies, you had to get them somehow. Did you grow them on trees? Win them in a lottery? Get a clue!
"Interference *is* the issue of spectral efficiency!"
No it is not. Bandwidth restrictions is
The reason people care about spectral efficiency is interference. If you had no interference, you could run an infinite number of stations on the same channel. But because of interference, you are forced to chose modulation schemes which minimize the interference - which is to say, those schemes which allow the greatest number of transmitters on the same frequency without degraded performance due to interference.
Get it? I hope so.
NONSENSE! Spectral efficiency cannot be fixed by allocating more bandwidth! Spectral efficiency *is* the ratio of information rate divided by bandwidth.
More importantly, in the case of cellular and other systems, is spectral efficiency per area used, or put another way, the number of simultaneous users you can have per megahertz per square kilometer.
Spectral efficiency is extremely important. But of course other factors are also important. However, DSS modulation is already known to be better at multipath rejection (what you call holes). Interference *is* the issue of spectral efficiency!
This does not change the import of what I am saying. Their practices to hold onto customers, which include not giving the codes, but also other things, result in a system that is inferior in all ways but technical to the European system.
I have a CDMA phone in the US. I used to use it on Sprint. I went to another carrier that also uses CDMA, but I couldn't use the phone! Why? Because Sprint refused to release the unlock codes for the phone!
IOW, the technical standards aren't enough for a successful system. The carriers also need to realize that their current business practices are retarding the development of good cellular services in the US. In order to reduce churn (people moving from one system to another), they intentionally throw up compatibility problems - such as I described above. They *like* the fact that I have to buy a new phone to use one of their competitors. I currently have contracts with four cellular companies, and every one requires a different phone! This is *not* really a technical issue, as some of those phones operate in 3 different modes!
Then there is the issue of roaming. Does anyone imagine that roaming in the US is anything other than a method to seriously soak the traveler? Of course, if you have the "right" plan, and you roam to your own carriers' network (a couple of exceptions apply), you don't pay the huge roaming charges (often 60-90 cents per minute). If you travel to rural areas (as I do when tornado chasing), this is a huge issue.
The free market in the US did indeed allow the best technology to evolve, and the anti-free market posts in this discussion seem to be ideologically driven rather than fact driven in this regard.
Unfortunately, that market has so far produced an inferior business model where the phones don't operate across multiple systems; where advanced services (such as messaging) likewise are proprietary; where vendors strive for unique (incompatible) services in order to take market share; where there is great waste as each of a number of providers has to provision the same geographical area.
Overall, my take is that the US has used the power of the free market to allow the best technology to be proven, to the advantage of the rest of the world and at great cost to America!
The issue that was debated was the spectral efficiency of CDMA, which I am sure is what the author meant. Everyone knew that Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (of which CDMA is a subset) works. But nobody could prove that CDMA, in the real world, could work as well as TDMA and provide better spectral efficiencies. There were many very serious people involved in this issue, but ultimately it took real world operational tests, not theory, to prove out CDMA.
Next I suppose we will have a lawsuit from a visually challenged person that they cannot get proper access to a pr0n site. The court will rule that the site must provide blow-up dolls hooked to the web browser and controlled by Javascript for the poor guy.
Long ago, a science fiction writer (I don't remember who, unfortunately) wrote a short story about a society which tried to equalize everything for everybody. If you were too fast, you wore weights to slow you down. If you were too smart, you wore a device that randomly made a loud noise and startled you out of your train of thought.
We are headed that way!
You persist in missing the point.
Has it ever occurred to you that a paper on properly done research may not be applicable to every possible situation? That there are not only variations in situation, but also in individuals?
I don't have to read Bill Buxton's paper to know that track balls work better for me, for what I do. After all, I am quite capable of carrying out the experiment myself, and have done so.
For you to continue arguing, you will find yourself in the position of asserting that a mouse is better than a trackball for my situation, since that is what I have been talking about. Somehow I doubt that you really would like to assert that.
There was nothing in his paper that addressed my particular situation. It is utterly irrelevant that a mouse is superior to a trackball for the tested circumstances, isn't it?
Cape Canaveral launches over water! Range safety destroys the vehicle before it can get over land.
Vandenberg likewise launches over water.
White Sands launches over a military area where they can prohibit entry.
Fort Stockton, OTOH, is landlocked with no place to create a completely safe range.
It has a low population density, but it is *far* from unpopulated! Don't forget all the Texas nationalists hiding out in the Guadalupe Mountains nearby!
I have to drive through the Town of Paradise Valley, AZ to get anywhere from my home. I also get a copy of their newspaper.
Paradise Valley (a Phoenix suburb) was the first city in the US to use photo-radar. And in spite of the gunfire attack on it (mentioned in the referenced article) they still operate it every day from small SUV's. They have also installed a stop-light system.
What makes their photo-radar so objectionable is that PV has lower speed limits on through streets through this little town than adjoining cities have on the same streets - even though the streets in PV are *safer* to go fast on. The speed limit on four lane divided road with relatively few side roads is 40mph. In Phoenix, it is 45 on the same roads. PV also has along standing attitude (it is the richest community in Arizona) that folks from other towns shouldn't drive through PV (even though it squats on two im-portant mountain passes in the middle of the metro area.
When the PV photo radar is challenged, they fight just long enough to make the costs more than the cost of the ticket, but always give in before an appeal which could rule it illegal!
The radars are operated by a vendor who gets a cut in the proceeds. I believe that the reason they have to have a person in the vehicle with the radar is to prevent the radar from being destroyed.
There is no doubt in my mind that the only purposes of the radars are:
1 - to discourage people from driving through the town
2 - to enhance town revenues
Oh, BTW... radar detectors are useless against the speed radar. It runs extremely low power and looks at traffic from a 22.5 degree angle. You *might* get one signal out of the detector if you are right behind someone who gets hit. Otherwise, no luck.
Many people here warn other motorists in oncoming lanes by flashing their lights after passing the radar. I wish more did.
Actually, my armchair rationalization is also informed by my experience of some years as a consultant to the military in the human factors area. One thing I learned is how much BS is published in the field.
The paper may indeed show that the next time I am marking pie menus, I may want to use a mouse. Of course, this is assuming the research is valid and replicable, and more important - applies to me - a specific individual with specific physical and mental characteristics, which is my point. Humans are variable.
Regardless of what the research shows for the specific subjects selected to do the specific task in the research, the Kensington Expert Mouse trackball that I use works better, for this individual human, doing what this particular human does with a pointing device, than a mouse does.
If I want to sign my name on the screen, I'll use a mouse. If I want to use a pie menu, maybe I'll use a mouse for that.
I rarely do either!
it has already been determined that "terrorists" did not and generally dont use crypto for communication, so thats just a lame excuse to keep the tools crippled
And how exactly was this determined? This makes the assumption that:
(a) We know how all terrorists communicate.
(b) All terrorists are idiots.
Of course terrorists do and will use crypto where it suits their purposes. Organized terrorists in general tend to be a lot smarter than organized criminals. And organized criminals *do* use crypto - especially large scale drug smugglers.
Now, this does not mean that crypto should (or can be) illegal.
Like so many human characteristics, I suspect that individual differences affect the relative merits of track-balls vs. mice.
I have used both and prefer track balls. Many other folks do also, but most seem to prefer mice.
So how is this going to work with my track ball?
:-)
Mice are for people with more than 10 cm^2 of desk space
Which, of course, is the whole point of futures contracts. They allow people to produce products before the demand is assured.
But then those "future contracts" will have a premium, like insurrance contracts.
And government subsidies don't hvae a premium? Be serious. Government subsidies are incredibly inefficient when operated for reasonable purposes. But in democracies, they tend to be operated to benefit producers, not the country in general. They have *huge* costs.
For the average Third World citizen, the prices *WILL* skyrocket on the bad years in any case - something that a responsible governement cannot allow. The agriculture is just the most random industry.
And why should the prices skyrocket for the third world and not for the first world? In a free market, this won't happen. And, of course, if we didn't have agricultural subsidies distorting the markets, there would be more production in the third world countries to begin with!
The governements subsidy production. This is, in effect, favoring the "invention of goods where there are none". Of course, they also handle the management of overproduction and destruction the extra goods of the good years, to prevent farmers to be bankrupt in those good years.
My goodness... how wise those bureaucrats must be! And why destroy the extra goods, rather than ship them to the third world where *they are needed!* Before, you were bewailing the effects of the free market on third world people's, and here you are advocating destruction of food, even though *every* year there are those who go hungry in the third world. Me thinks you are not very consistent.
No they don't have food shortages
So why do you bring them up in a discussion of food shortages??? It would appear that you have a general agenda to trash markets and blame the worlds' problems on them.
the countries are wise enough to have in general 90% or more of their food consumption provided by themselves, including US and EU. Argentinians can still eat, thanks god.
Wise? Or lucky?
"Temporary economic downturns" ??? In which world do you live? For instance, take the Mexican crisis, "most Mexicans were immediately 20-30% poorer in 1995 than in 1994" - it's not the "US/EU market crisis" where the stocks collapses but the growth is still here, it's real economic and industrial crisis.
Whenever someone picks two years out of a century or two of possible data in order to support their argument, it is likely that those two years are anomolous. This was pointed out, and numerous examples given, in The Skeptical Environmentalist.
So why should I make any conclusions because there was a disruption in Mexico between 1994 and 1995? And to what do you attribute that disruption? Could it have been government action? Or was it somehow the "free" market (which barely exists in Mexico due to extreme corruption). Why do you even bother to mention such an out-of-context, contrived statistic?
Living a few miles from Mexico, I follow their politics fairly closely and travel there frequently. I have done business with Mexican entities and witnessed the corruption . Mexico has endemic corruption at all levels of government, with extreme governmental meddling in the economy, which is the main reason that so many Mexicans risk their lives to get into the US every year - our lower level of corruption has produced economic miracles.
BTW... Mexico is a great example. Mexico has vast natural resources and is a major oil producer. It has a populace with a strong work ethic. It has a free trade agreement with the nation with the largest market on earth. It has *no* excuses for its laggard economic performance. The *only* cause is corruption. Why your would bring it up in what obviously is an attack on free markets is beyond me!
[re Asia]
That's possible, but it was created when the foreign countries withdrew massively their investments, and although those countries would had enough savings themselves to otherwise fund those.
Possible? It's true. And why did the foreign countries withdraw their investments? Could it be that those were bad investments? Duh!
For Japan, it is partly created by the current governement (or rather the economic culture) - but on the other hand, it's this very same way to organize industry and banks which made Japan so successful 1970-1980.
Your point? This seems to have drifted far from agricultural subsidies. In any case, Japan is a good example of how government can screw things up. If they had a less corrupt and more flexible system, it would have adapted when the export driven model failed. Instead, they are locked into their old policies after they are no longer profitable. BTW, my brother owns a business in Japan that is part of one of the major Kereitsu's (sp?), and has added to the knowledge of this I have gained from reading about it. Japanese agricultural subsidies also cause significant disruptions in their economy - primarily by creating artificial shortages of land.
For Russia as for many third world countries, it is in part created by the governement actions ; simply free market (i.e. heavily dependance on imports and exports) which is very instable, and make small mismanagement explode in huge crisis - especially since they don't have much control on their currency (as opposed to US and EU).
In every third world country that I am aware of, governmental corruption (often enhanced by misguided policies of the IMF and World Bank) is the root cause of their failure to thrive economically.
Countries with even slightly reasonable policies do well.
Russia is a special case, because it was a second world country recently, and because it went through a sudden collapse of the existing (highly inefficient) communist system that caused a larger than normal level of corruption - a level so high that it is dangerous to do business there because violent crime is part of business for too many.
[stockpiles vs subsidies]
Sorry, but the second amounts to the first. For instance, EU doesn't subdisise quite a number of type of foods (EU subsidises on export), and de facto is just keeping this food for its own market. You just can't store 3 months of food like that.
Sure, those Western Countries would *love* to depend heavily on other countries for the most vital good there is ; you thought OPEP and oil shock was bad enough? Just wait for the "Big Hunger" - after all, if one country want to stop its exports to another for political reasons, this is a free market, you can't force them to do so, right? And just wait, there is a war between a big-exporter-India and Pakistan - or even only war threats. It's not like Western Countries couldn't afford overpriced but guaranteed food.
You raise the only valid reason for government action in agriculture: national security. But the subsidies programs are far different from what would be necessary for national security. I agree that governments should supplement the market in maintaining stockpiles of critical supplies. But they could do that by buying on the open market.
As far as the argument that countries could simply stop food shipments... this is really rather silly for several reasons:
1) It takes more than food in big storage houses in order to be fed. It takes energy (oil) to move that food, and to produce additional food. Thus a shutoff of oil would cause a food shortage just as much as a shutoff of food would.
2) There are many countries capable of producing food - many more than can produce oil. They aren't all going to shut off food.
3) First world countries are dependent for their economy, and ultimately their critical life supporting infrastructures, on many other countries. For example, almost all chromium comes from one or two countries in Africa. So we are already in an interdependent world. There is no reason to make a special case of food - a modern civilization needs a lot more than food in order for most of its citizens to survive.
3) The government stockpile systems would contract long term for food.
4) If a country cut off contracted-for food for political reasons, it would amount to an act of war (political cutoffs amount to embargos and are not the acts of a free market as you imply). The US at least has kept a military sufficient to guarantee the supply of food.
This is stupid. The market is extremely adaptable, but can't do wonders. You see, it takes 6 months to 1 year to grow crops.
... and now Western Countries) - that's why governements subsidy.
Gee... I thought the just appeared in the grocery store by magic!
If the production isn't here, your free market will just make the prices skyrocket. It can't invent goods were there are none.
Stupid? Have you ever heard of futures contracts? I figured not. Do you really think that the supply and demand side of the food business operates only in real time? The food markets have mechanisms in place for dealing with future demand, not just current demand. It would indeed be stupid to only use the spot market, but *real* markets don't work that way. Farmers and those who store commodities plan ahead! If they don't, they go out of business.
BTW... If you think that farmers cannot invent goods when there are none, how are governments going to do that?
Free markets don't prevent crisis. In fact they tend to create bigger crisis (like the 5 or 6 major ones there have been in the 10 last years - Asian countries, Mexico, Russia, Argentina/South America,
Just exactly which crisis are you talking about? Those areas don't have food shortages! Most of those areas don't have crises at all. Or do you think that temporary economic downturns amount to crises?
Russia certainly has a crisis, but it isn't caused by free markets. It is caused by an economic system that is extremely corrupt (free markets don't work if there is too much corruption). The corruption is due to lingering power held by former communist bosses, and the lack of respect for law and order by them and others. Russia also is suffering from severe misallocations of labor and capital due to 70 years of central government control of the economy. It also has severe social problems, an overhang from the collapse of communism and the destruction of public confidence.
The crises in the Asian countries are due primarily to "industrial policy" - where the governments, in their infinite wisdom, "guide" the investments. Guess what! They guided wrong.
The long term crisis in Japan is caused by severe corruption in government, severe private corruption (bank owning stock in those they lend to, as an example), industrial policy, and the unwillingness of the government to let failed companies and banks fail. If they did the latter (and they are finally starting to), much of the locked up investment potential would be released and they would start to recover. They would do even better if they cleaned up the governmental corruption (which is much harder - the bureaucracy in Japan is extremely powerful compared to the elected leaders, and is extremely intertwined with big business).
While it may make sense for governments to maintain stockpiles of food for extreme emergencies, it does not make any sense for them to maintain the kind of farm subsidies we see today. Those subsidies exist for one purpose: to protect western farmers from competition from farmers in the poor countries, and from competition from each other. This has the effect of increasing poverty in third world countries for the sole benefit of the relatively small number of people in the western world who are farmers.
In addition to elaborate subsidies, there are elaborate systems of price and supply controls which serve to *reduce* the amount of food produced and to transfer wealth from consumers of food to producers of food. This is true both in the US and in Western Europe.
It seems that every news article about weather events these days mentions a possible connection to climate change! Has it occurred to anyone that since there is a lot of money for climate change research, scientists, in response to the inevitable reporter question, will of course say it *might* have something to do with climate change.
It is time for a new fear. Climate change is getting trite!