The problem though is that maintenance is more than just the phone. You've got the entire infrastructure which is slowly becoming less and less profitable to maintain. For example, look how verizon went to a lot of effort to dump much of their copper infrastructure on little telcos.
You are right. What a poor show I have made here, it's really embarassing. I shoudl have known with your first post that your sublime grasp of the issues vastly exceeded mine and that all of my hugely ordinary claims should have been backed up with extrordinary evidence. I sure am glad you were here to correct me and all of those other people who I inadvertently fooled with my silly and logically inconsistent statements. I really am lucky to have lived so long seeing how clueless I am about the world around me.
Are you serious? This past week I was completely unable to make or receive calls in an area of normal coverage. I live on the south shore of Long Island, NY.
You mean the area that got hit by the hurricane? What part of non-emergency conditions do fail to understand?
Or a thief could just go jogging around the block for a while in the morning.
That doesn't tell you who is on vacation. Nor does it tell you anything if the people have their garage doors closed. Drop a sniffer somewhere unobtrusive for a week and you'll know about every house on the block without risk of people noticing a stranger casing the neighborhood either.
Now show me the cell phone system that works 99% of the time during wide scale power outages and we'll get right to work on that last 1%.
Don't be obtuse. This isn't about having 99% functionality during an emergency. Didn't you notice we were talking about PAY PHONES? Do you think people queueing up to use a pay phone is the equivalent of 99% POTS functionality?
This entire discussion has been about maintaining a minimum level of civilian communications under emergency conditions. Not whatever pipe dream you've been smoking.
It is not. That's why I said "on the flipside" - so unless you think things like better facilitlies is a bad thing I don't see how you could come to that conclusion.
Somethings stick around simply because you can't beat a classic. Sure, something shinier comes along, the old reliable gets put back in teh corner, gathering dust. But then when shiny breaks, as it always must, you still got Ol Reliable back in teh corner just waiting.
You seem to be laboring under the misconception that POTS "just works" - it does not. It requires regular testing and maintenance. Emergency use of POTS has always piggybacked on primary regular usage - if primary usage goes away either the payphones will degrade into unreliability or we will have to spend more money to maintain their emergency readiness. I think it is smarter to spend that money on making the current system more reliable.
This isn't about new and shiny versus old and boring, this is about comprehensive cost/benefit analysis.
I find your nuke comparison completely unpersuasive due to irrelevancy. However I will make it relevant by pointing out that the reason we spend massive amounts of money maintaining the nukes is because we do not use them - the entire ASCI program is a way to "test" without testing. Payphones don't get used regularly so in order to guarantee operation in emergency conditions we would have to up the amount of maintenance they receive.
Contrast that to individual cell phones which are "tested" every day and my proposed wireless backhauls which would ideally already use the digital communications infrastructure that the police already use in their cars today.
I'm going to start by making the point that without citation, I find the concept that the existing cellular infrastructure experiences 99% uptime utter malarkey.
Really? How many times have you used a cell phone and been unable to make a call? I mean not just a dropped call that you redialed and it worked but completely unable to make or receive calls in an area of normal coverage under non-emergency conditions? I have not had that experience for at least 15 years now. If you would like to disprove a claim which, as far as I know, is basically everybody's experience please provide a citation.
Also worth mention, abandoning the working POTS infrastructure and focusing 100% on cellular is putting all your eggs in one basket, a practice any emergency management expert will tell you is not good practice.
Sounds like you don't understand my proposal. For one thing, we have multiple carriers and even when those share a tower and similar backhauls you still have each mobile pico-cell in emergency vehicles providing its own redundant path - you might lose a couple of pico-cells but not all of them.
In other words: Don't bother keeping what works working, instead we should spend obscene amounts of money and manpower on some new, theoretical system that may or may not work.
Uh no. Maybe you haven't noticed but payphones are going away because nobody is willing to spend an obscene amount of money maintaining them because nobody uses them. Meanwhile cell phone usage continues to increase. What i propose is to tweak the system that works 99% of the time so that it works 100% of the time.
Private Schools: Again, works if you can afford it, but they are more expensive.
And at the same time, they pay the teachers less. I'm a product of one of the best private schools in my state and the average salary there was substantially less than what public school teachers earned. On the flipside the teaching environment was fantastic in just about every way - better facilities, better teaching materials, better administration and better students (much easier to expell a kid from private school).
Instead of maintaining a system that is practically obsolete we should put the effort into making the newer system more robust.
How about building pico-cells into emergency vehicles with some sort of dedicated wireless backhaul? Figure out how to queue access to cell phones so that even if such a system can only handle 5-10 voice calls at once (due to backhaul bandwidth limits), anyone with a basic cell phone can virtually "wait in line" until it is their turn to talk.
It doesn't have to be limited to emergency vehicles, we could build stand-alone units too that could be battery powered and deployed fairly quickly.
Quite a few things, for example less sword rattling in the Iran/Israel region (A war would reduce US purchasing power and affect global economy just like Iraq did). Less of a "trade war" with China (calling them a "currency manipulator on day one" certainly doesn't help trade & relations.
The general perception is that Romney says whatever he thinks is most opportune at the moment. I think it is at least marginally better to look at actions rather than words. Based on that I agree that Romney is more likely to wage war on Iran because his chief foreign policy advisor is BFFs with some only-good-muslim-is-a-dead-muslim types. But I disagree with you on china because he's done business with china through Bain - personal experience tends to give one a more nuanced understanding of related issues.
A vote for a mainstream candidate in a non contested state is the real wasted vote.
I think that a vote for a D or R in a contested state is even more wasted than in a non-contested state. Because the D&Rs dominate the only way to make them adopt change is to scare them into thinking they won't win the state - they have no fear in the states that are not contested.
So if you vote 3rd party based on your conscience this time around and the D or R that you disagree with more wins the state you have exercised the only leverage you have - that a party that doesn't represent you could have had your vote but they effed it up. If they want your vote next election, they need to adopt some of the positions of the 3rd party that you did vote for. Winners keep doing what they were doing because it worked last time. Losers change their tactics in order to try to win next time.
BTW, this is why I think the Tea Party is a sham - they aren't a real party, just a wing of the republican party. You can't vote for a tea party presidential candidate the way you can for a real 3rd party candidate.
Obama himself lamented that he failed to close gitmo during his most recent interview on the daily show. I don't think he would do that if he felt he was politically vulnerable on that point.
At least luck is a factor. Obama has already proven he's more then willing to run with this crap, and that was in the first term when he'd theoretically be trying to stay enough on the good side of the populace to get reelected.
The problem is that this shit is popular with the general populace because most people don't have enough empathy or foresight to realize how it can be misused. They hear that it is all about keeping them safe from teh terrorists and that's good enough for them. If anything, Obama's been pandering to the majority of the population with this shit.
There is no need to try and compare unlawful access to a computer system by a foreign entity to an attack that killed thousands of people and drew the US into one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history.
Yes there is if you are looking to provide a justification for continuing to feed trillions of dollars to the military-industrial complex.
I thought it would be pretty funny if he pointed at the fixed surveillance camera and said "Oh, the camera feed stopped working, so I am doing it manually until the repair crew can get out here"
That would be awesome. You should email him that idea. Chances are this whole protest thing is a work in progress and he'd probably welcome suggestions to make it more effective that don't make it any harder for him.
The problem is inefficiency. Power drops with the square of distance.
That's when the transmitter is essentially a point source radiating in a sphere. I have a tiny bit of experience with very high powered radars that use beam-forming to narrowly direct their transmission. In the past that sort of beam-forming required lots of bulky equipment, but apparently that's changed in the last decade or so. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar could be used to direct wireless power with much better efficiencies.
So what is this magical consumer router that forces users to log in? Where is the database of users held?
Most current model wireless routers support a seperate guest network that defaults to open access. Put the QoS limits on that and leave the passworded network without limits. No need to manage individual accounts. It may not work exactly as you've extrapolated, but close enough for most of us.
few would consider a spare vehicle to be a cost-effective workaround.
Most would consider the occasional rental for the occasional long distance trip to be a perfectly acceptable work around. Kind of like the way we rent a seat on airplane when a traditional car is not fast enough.
It'll never happen though, what's to stop all the neighborhood leeches from freeloading off my cable modem and save themselves $50 a month?
Bandwidth limits on unknown users. If all they need to do is check their email and read the web, then you could have 20 such leeches and never really notice it.
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That's a great idea, what town is this in?
The problem though is that maintenance is more than just the phone. You've got the entire infrastructure which is slowly becoming less and less profitable to maintain. For example, look how verizon went to a lot of effort to dump much of their copper infrastructure on little telcos.
You are right. What a poor show I have made here, it's really embarassing. I shoudl have known with your first post that your sublime grasp of the issues vastly exceeded mine and that all of my hugely ordinary claims should have been backed up with extrordinary evidence. I sure am glad you were here to correct me and all of those other people who I inadvertently fooled with my silly and logically inconsistent statements. I really am lucky to have lived so long seeing how clueless I am about the world around me.
A salesman sticking flyers in people's door handles is annoying, but not very suspicious.
Until it happens to a couple of neighborhoods and people start to put two and two together.
Are you serious? This past week I was completely unable to make or receive calls in an area of normal coverage. I live on the south shore of Long Island, NY.
You mean the area that got hit by the hurricane? What part of non-emergency conditions do fail to understand?
Or a thief could just go jogging around the block for a while in the morning.
That doesn't tell you who is on vacation. Nor does it tell you anything if the people have their garage doors closed. Drop a sniffer somewhere unobtrusive for a week and you'll know about every house on the block without risk of people noticing a stranger casing the neighborhood either.
Pay phones are POTS functionality, you moron. Put away whatever the hell you're smoking and pay some fucking attention.
Pay phones are a specific subset of POTS functionality, you moron. Put away whatever the hell you're smoking and pay some fucking attention.
Now show me the cell phone system that works 99% of the time during wide scale power outages and we'll get right to work on that last 1%.
Don't be obtuse. This isn't about having 99% functionality during an emergency. Didn't you notice we were talking about PAY PHONES? Do you think people queueing up to use a pay phone is the equivalent of 99% POTS functionality?
This entire discussion has been about maintaining a minimum level of civilian communications under emergency conditions. Not whatever pipe dream you've been smoking.
It is not. That's why I said "on the flipside" - so unless you think things like better facilitlies is a bad thing I don't see how you could come to that conclusion.
Somethings stick around simply because you can't beat a classic. Sure, something shinier comes along, the old reliable gets put back in teh corner, gathering dust. But then when shiny breaks, as it always must, you still got Ol Reliable back in teh corner just waiting.
You seem to be laboring under the misconception that POTS "just works" - it does not. It requires regular testing and maintenance. Emergency use of POTS has always piggybacked on primary regular usage - if primary usage goes away either the payphones will degrade into unreliability or we will have to spend more money to maintain their emergency readiness. I think it is smarter to spend that money on making the current system more reliable.
This isn't about new and shiny versus old and boring, this is about comprehensive cost/benefit analysis.
I find your nuke comparison completely unpersuasive due to irrelevancy. However I will make it relevant by pointing out that the reason we spend massive amounts of money maintaining the nukes is because we do not use them - the entire ASCI program is a way to "test" without testing. Payphones don't get used regularly so in order to guarantee operation in emergency conditions we would have to up the amount of maintenance they receive.
Contrast that to individual cell phones which are "tested" every day and my proposed wireless backhauls which would ideally already use the digital communications infrastructure that the police already use in their cars today.
I'm going to start by making the point that without citation, I find the concept that the existing cellular infrastructure experiences 99% uptime utter malarkey.
Really? How many times have you used a cell phone and been unable to make a call? I mean not just a dropped call that you redialed and it worked but completely unable to make or receive calls in an area of normal coverage under non-emergency conditions? I have not had that experience for at least 15 years now. If you would like to disprove a claim which, as far as I know, is basically everybody's experience please provide a citation.
Also worth mention, abandoning the working POTS infrastructure and focusing 100% on cellular is putting all your eggs in one basket, a practice any emergency management expert will tell you is not good practice.
Sounds like you don't understand my proposal. For one thing, we have multiple carriers and even when those share a tower and similar backhauls you still have each mobile pico-cell in emergency vehicles providing its own redundant path - you might lose a couple of pico-cells but not all of them.
In other words:
Don't bother keeping what works working, instead we should spend obscene amounts of money and manpower on some new, theoretical system that may or may not work.
Uh no. Maybe you haven't noticed but payphones are going away because nobody is willing to spend an obscene amount of money maintaining them because nobody uses them. Meanwhile cell phone usage continues to increase. What i propose is to tweak the system that works 99% of the time so that it works 100% of the time.
Private Schools: Again, works if you can afford it, but they are more expensive.
And at the same time, they pay the teachers less. I'm a product of one of the best private schools in my state and the average salary there was substantially less than what public school teachers earned. On the flipside the teaching environment was fantastic in just about every way - better facilities, better teaching materials, better administration and better students (much easier to expell a kid from private school).
Instead of maintaining a system that is practically obsolete we should put the effort into making the newer system more robust.
How about building pico-cells into emergency vehicles with some sort of dedicated wireless backhaul? Figure out how to queue access to cell phones so that even if such a system can only handle 5-10 voice calls at once (due to backhaul bandwidth limits), anyone with a basic cell phone can virtually "wait in line" until it is their turn to talk.
It doesn't have to be limited to emergency vehicles, we could build stand-alone units too that could be battery powered and deployed fairly quickly.
Quite a few things, for example less sword rattling in the Iran/Israel region (A war would reduce US purchasing power and affect global economy just like Iraq did). Less of a "trade war" with China (calling them a "currency manipulator on day one" certainly doesn't help trade & relations.
The general perception is that Romney says whatever he thinks is most opportune at the moment. I think it is at least marginally better to look at actions rather than words. Based on that I agree that Romney is more likely to wage war on Iran because his chief foreign policy advisor is BFFs with some only-good-muslim-is-a-dead-muslim types. But I disagree with you on china because he's done business with china through Bain - personal experience tends to give one a more nuanced understanding of related issues.
A vote for a mainstream candidate in a non contested state is the real wasted vote.
I think that a vote for a D or R in a contested state is even more wasted than in a non-contested state. Because the D&Rs dominate the only way to make them adopt change is to scare them into thinking they won't win the state - they have no fear in the states that are not contested.
So if you vote 3rd party based on your conscience this time around and the D or R that you disagree with more wins the state you have exercised the only leverage you have - that a party that doesn't represent you could have had your vote but they effed it up. If they want your vote next election, they need to adopt some of the positions of the 3rd party that you did vote for. Winners keep doing what they were doing because it worked last time. Losers change their tactics in order to try to win next time.
BTW, this is why I think the Tea Party is a sham - they aren't a real party, just a wing of the republican party. You can't vote for a tea party presidential candidate the way you can for a real 3rd party candidate.
If they are working, they also pay payroll tax, social security, FICA, etc.
Correct, the precentage of people who do not pay payroll taxes is 18% - and most of them are retirees.
Furthermore, Obama cut payroll taxes and the GOP had a big WTF? moment given their support for the orignally temporary "Bush" tax cuts.
Obama himself lamented that he failed to close gitmo during his most recent interview on the daily show. I don't think he would do that if he felt he was politically vulnerable on that point.
At least luck is a factor. Obama has already proven he's more then willing to run with this crap, and that was in the first term when he'd theoretically be trying to stay enough on the good side of the populace to get reelected.
The problem is that this shit is popular with the general populace because most people don't have enough empathy or foresight to realize how it can be misused. They hear that it is all about keeping them safe from teh terrorists and that's good enough for them. If anything, Obama's been pandering to the majority of the population with this shit.
There is no need to try and compare unlawful access to a computer system by a foreign entity to an attack that killed thousands of people and drew the US into one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history.
Yes there is if you are looking to provide a justification for continuing to feed trillions of dollars to the military-industrial complex.
I thought it would be pretty funny if he pointed at the fixed surveillance camera and said "Oh, the camera feed stopped working, so I am doing it manually until the repair crew can get out here"
That would be awesome. You should email him that idea. Chances are this whole protest thing is a work in progress and he'd probably welcome suggestions to make it more effective that don't make it any harder for him.
Then the pussy shouldn't be doing it at all.
If you don't like his form of protest then you go do it the way you think it ought to be done. Otherwise you are the pussy.
The problem is inefficiency. Power drops with the square of distance.
That's when the transmitter is essentially a point source radiating in a sphere. I have a tiny bit of experience with very high powered radars that use beam-forming to narrowly direct their transmission. In the past that sort of beam-forming required lots of bulky equipment, but apparently that's changed in the last decade or so. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar could be used to direct wireless power with much better efficiencies.
So what is this magical consumer router that forces users to log in? Where is the database of users held?
Most current model wireless routers support a seperate guest network that defaults to open access. Put the QoS limits on that and leave the passworded network without limits. No need to manage individual accounts. It may not work exactly as you've extrapolated, but close enough for most of us.
few would consider a spare vehicle to be a cost-effective workaround.
Most would consider the occasional rental for the occasional long distance trip to be a perfectly acceptable work around. Kind of like the way we rent a seat on airplane when a traditional car is not fast enough.
It'll never happen though, what's to stop all the neighborhood leeches from freeloading off my cable modem and save themselves $50 a month?
Bandwidth limits on unknown users. If all they need to do is check their email and read the web, then you could have 20 such leeches and never really notice it.