Sprint rolled out 3G 3 years ago also, and successfully, unlike the early Japan 3G rollout which was aborted and undone.
You're mistakenly putting the US in some kind of phone ghetto.
Yes, I do agree about the what GSM makes it possible not only technically, but in a market fashion to sell phones that have additional features. It really leads the way in this. It's why I use GSM, because I like fancy phones. But for people like my father who don't care about fancy phones, it gets them zero.
I would say that although GSM unquestionably is the strongest force in this trend, and still leads, the other systems pull their weight. Push-to-talk (may all users of it die horrible deaths) didn't start on GSM (it came from iDEN and CDMA 2000 got it 2nd). IS-136 created voicemail notification and caller ID before GSM even started.
CDMA providers don't want this because they would rather sell you features. Sprint made a fair bit of money off selling voice dialing as a service. Putting it in the phone removes revenue. Providers don't want Bluetooth data service (leashing) because it makes it difficult for them to provide "unlimited data service" profitably. They figure you can only push so much data surfing the web on a phone with that awful display and joystick, but with leashing I can push a month's worth of data in an hour from my computer through my phone. Even Danger, with the best browser in the business and always-on AIM IM has to fight with operators over this because customers will easily use more bandwidth than they are really paying for at $20 a month.
Look at camera phones. Providers like camera phones, they even subsidize them, because once you take the picture they figure you have to email it to yourself to save it or let others view it. But with Bluetooth you can just send the pic to your computer next time you are there without paying the operator. So what did Verizon (CDMA operator) do about this? They convinced Motorola to disable the Bluetooth file transfer feature on the v710 phone on Verizon! They want Bluetooth because then they can sell you an overpriced Bluetooth headset accessory, but they didn't want file transfer, so they disabled it.
Now, on GSM they can't stop me, I can buy an unbranded phone (and I do) with loads of features and put my SIM in. On Verizon or Sprint, they only offer what they want, there is virtually no market for phones except through the provider, and if you did happen to find a 3rd party phone, they might not even activate it for you.
I left Verizon because they were controlling the phones too much, a feature never appeared unless they thought it was to their advantage. So no feature appeared until the other operators proved it made sense (they were the last US operator to offer a Bluetooth phone). I felt they were over controlling. Much like the movie industry would have killed the VCR if they could have in the early days (see Jack Valenti's "Boston Strangler" comments), I felt Verizon was not only hurting me, but hurting themselves.
I left Verizon because of this. I went to Sprint, because they had the only CDMA Bluetooth phone in the US (outside of Korea actually). Well, it turned out to be truly terrible (Sony-Ericsson T608) and their coverage sucked too, so I went to GSM and the phones are indeed cool on GSM.
As to your comments about IS-136 being incompatible, your comments are 180 degrees off and typify the complete misunderstanding Europeans have about GSM and why the US is incompatible.
The operator my dad uses (Cingular) was a AMPS operator (well, the component parts of the now merged company) before GSM even existed. They used IS-136 because it was COMPATIBLE, and not GSM because it was designed to be incompatible. Years later this stupid European decision is still hurting people like my dad, because if GSM was compatible, companies who had preexisting customers (i.e. revenue to protect) would have switched to GSM in the mid 90s instead of setting up or continuing with IS-136. And my father wouldn't have been
This idea of online storage was pretty big in the.com days, with Xdrive and such. And yes, there were plenty of drives with warez on them and the passwords sent around via Hotline or whatever.
The companies had to spend a lot of time policing accounts. Certainly Apple does with.Mac too.
There are a bunch of companies right now that are largely used to pirate files, like megaupload.com or rapidshare.de.
So very good prediction, but you're actually predicting the past, it turns out.
I don't quite see how people can get so righteous about this.
MS has internal business. Some of this includes security. It is their choice whether to release the info or not.
Other companies are making similar decisions. Does Apple ever tell you what is fixed in iPod 1.1.1 software or iTunes 6.0.4?
MS is taking a risk people might not patch. But if they want to take that risk, it's up to them. Why do people just love explaining how they'd do things better than MS all the time?
GSM is outmoded, and the only thing it is doing better for the customer here is providing choice of phones. It doesn't provide as good coverage, as much bandwidth for data users and it's tougher for operators to run!
Having had all 3 major systems here in the US in the last 3 years, I don't see a problem with any of them. I don't know what you heard, but our systems work well. And they have been working well (including my own phone) since before GSM even existed.
The invisible hand has driven out the systems that don't work as well as others (IS-136, and it hasn't been possible to get an AMPS phone activated for two years). It'd drive out the next worst system too, except it can't, the next worst system is GSM.
I do appreciate that Europe regulated in such a way as to make a market for different kinds of phones. That's great. That just doesn't exist on CDMA, because the CDMA operators don't want it, and they can make sure it doesn't happen.
But for someone like my father, who was recently put onto GSM from IS-136 (TDMA), he has nothing but complaints. He doesn't care about fancy phones, and the coverage sucks because GSM was made incompatible with the systems that were already in use and thus he can only use new towers.
GSM is nothing but pain for him, and it's pain because of the boneheaded decisions made in Europe circa 1992 and enforced by law.
You're right about the fees. Is the US the only location with fees all of a sudden? And again, you're getting a lot more stuff bundled in in the US due to the way incoming calls are billed.
The high cost of phones isn't much different anywhere. Phones cost a lot. They are cheaper everywhere when subsidized, not just in the US. I personally don't like two year contracts, so I don't sign them. My last phone cost $40 with a 1-year cingular contract (which is now expired and I am month to month). You maybe should looked for a more stripped-down phone. High-end phones just cost a lot to make, so they cost a lot to buy.
I have no idea what you mean about how it's difficult to switch carriers. I have switched twice in 3 years. No problems. And if you have you own phone, it's even easier! I purchased my unlocked/unbranded phone and put it on Cingular myself.
Just put your SIM in, select your country and carrier and click a few times and it sends a text to your phone with the setup info and you press "yes" and you're done. Easy as pie. Of course, it's no easier or tougher in Europe, since this service works worldwide.
We already do get coverage in all the parts where people actually are.
Okay, well, not all parts. I can drive roads in Alpine county where there is no coverage. But Alpine county has a population density of less than 1 person per km^2.
There is some kind of massive misunderstanding being perpetuated here. We have plenty of cell phone coverage in the US. All the 3 major operators service over 98% of the population. The reason maps or other numbers make it look like we don't have coverage here is because Wyoming has 500,000 people in 253,554 km^2. And most of those are in cities. So you see the state on a coverage map and most of it is blank. But that's simply because there's no one to cover there. And it's mountainous, so you can't just do umbrella cells.
Just come to the US West sometime. Go to Wyoming, go to Idaho, go to Montana, go to Utah. Go to California, the most populous states in the nation. Just drive in from the coast or north of San Francisco. Heck go to Alaska. You'll see the magnitude of the idea of covering all the area of the US (or Canada for that matter).
But don't make a mistake. If you actually measure where people live, we have plenty of cell phone coverage in the US, on all 3 systems.
For starters, cell phone usage is cheaper in the US. Even before you consider what you get in terms of free roaming nationwide.
I just checked Orange UK. Let's see, I'd like 200 minutes and 100 texts. That's 25 Pounds. That's about US$40.
Now, let's go to Cingular. Cingular not even being one of the cheaper plans. Let's see what I get for US$40. I get 450 minutes, with lots of night/weekend minutes too! To get that on Orange would cost 40 pounds. And don't forget, if you call a cellular phone in Europe, you have to pay. In the US, not only is the monthly fee of the cellular customer paying for the landline guy to call him free, but if they're both on cellular, there's a chance the call is "free".
I do hear your thing about coverage maps. That's an interesting point. To eliminate those, you not only all need to use the same protocol, you also need to have 100% cross roaming agreements. If there's a single tower out there you can't use, then you are in a "coverage map" situation.
When I was on Verizon (previously GTE) I didn't have any need for coverage maps, I just had coverage everywhere. When I switched to Sprint and then Cingular my coverage dropped, but it's still damn good. Unless you truly go away from the things of man, you're gonna have coverage.
The GSM mandate had some interesting effects. It is what made the massive problems with compatibility. I personally owned an AMPS phone before GSM started up. Why couldn't GSM have been AMPS compatible? The Europeans designed it to be incompatible, and then oddly put the blame on Americans for not using GSM. Well, we already had many customers who would have been hurt by making their ($500+) phones stop working. It simply wasn't an option. The same thing happened in Finland, where AMPS went on quite some time. The US finally eliminates AMPS next year.
I think the GSM mandate worked out in Europe because it helped break the problem with landline operators holding people over a barrel. Landlines were so expensive, cell coverage was cheaper than a landline and so it took off like a rocket and brought a valueable services to the customer. I think a GSM mandate in the US wouldn't have had nearly as many positive effects.
Addititionally, the GSM mandate is really hurting now. GSM is obsolete. It just doesn't have the bandwidth efficiency it needs. And to add insult to injury, the flexibility to add more towers to fix the problem is more limited. CDMA bests it greatly on both cases.
As I make my GSM calls with the GSM half rate codec, I notice how GSM service is noticeably inferior to other options. But in Europe, the law prevents any exploration of any other options. GSM is mandated in all the decent frequency bands (900/1800). 1800 already requires many many cell cites to prevent deadspots, since it can't get through walls well. 3G-type frequncies (2100 in Europe), won't provide any comptition (notably because the same operators own those frequencies).
It's too bad the phones on CDMA suck so bad, and Verizon thinks that phone features are something they should be able to charge for or remove.
Besides wobbling side to side, they also wobble back to front. That is, they can't maintain a proper speed. They invariably slow down as they aren't paying attention and then when they notice, they zoom back up to speed. I've even noticed myself doing this on the phone, which is a big part of why I rarely talk on the phone when driving.
I can tell a driver is on the phone without actually seeing the driver, only the motions of the car. It's pretty characteristic.
I'm shocked it hasn't been more of a problem than it is. We have a lot of traffic around here, and people love to talk on the phone during their commutes. Cell phones must have increased the accident rate, I wonder why it hasn't shown up in the overall statistics.
I was glad when it was made illegal for bus drivers to talk on the cell phone, the thought of what they could do to their cargo and to others with those heavy vehicles is chilling. Restrictions on truck drivers should be next, starting with short haul drivers (local delivery drivers) as they seem to be the worst offenders.
I didn't think the Westinghouse was one of them though. I thought it only accepted 1080i input (same as a Sony SXRD), despite having 1920x1080 resolution.
Note that although the HP accepts 1080p, it isn't true progressive display. There is no such thing as a true 1080p DLP, as 1080-res DLPs use wobleration and thus are inherently interlaced.
Sharp has sold a couple 1080p-inputting, 1080-res, true 1080p output flat panels for a while now, long before the woblerating DLPs came out. These are available affordably up to 45" ($3K), and up to 65" if you can sport $20K for one.
If you have no intention of keeping it when you bought it, then you only pretended to buy it. You had one thing in mind ("borrowing" the item), and you did another (pretended to purchase the item) and it cost someone else money (the company), so you committed fraud. It's that simple.
If a store has to raise their prices to cover someone else's acts of fraud, it bothers me, because it hurts me. And if you owned the company, I'm sure you'd be concerned too.
Crimes aren't okay just because you don't happen to know personally the person you are hurting.
Jose isn't in Gitmo. My post was if this fellow is worried about Gitmo, he can avoid it for sure.
I don't agree with Padilla being held for years without trial or being charged, and I don't agree the government should be allowed to hold other people for years without trial just because they aren't on US soil.
What exactly are we fighting for? Our government makes people disappear, and even tortures people (sometimes to death). We're no kind of model of freedom anymore.
I take it you have paint still sitting around for every room in your house, so ripping out switches of wall, replacing them, retexturing them and painting them is a snap.
But for some of us, it isn't so easy. Paint matching is very good nowadays, but you still need to paint an area larger than a few feet with the edges right at eye level. Basically, you end up painting an entire wall.
And I don't have neutrals on most of my switches either. I even have ground in every junction box (even switch boxes), but no neutrals in some switch boxes.
Why? Because you don't need them. There's no safety issue or anything.
The neutral runs straight to the light, and only the hot is switched. That's 100% safe, and all that is necessary. Go to home depot and find a light switch. It has 3 terminals. 1 is ground. The other two are interchangeable, but we'll call one "hot in" and the other "intermittent hot out", that is, the terminal that is switched. Where is the neutral connection? It doesn't have one, you don't need it, there's in fact no place to attach it.
It's easy (apparently) for you to say bring this up to code, but doing it is rather difficult.
You're right, that in the end it has to be done, no device that actually draws power can be used in these switch boxes, not just Insteon. But it's still a big impediment to Insteon adoption.
"- Does not rely on sending signals thru the electrical system and all the problems that go along with that."
Yes it does.
Each switch is only hooked to your power lines and has no radio antenna. How do you think they get and send commands?
The RF units on Insteon is only for bridging and maybe for remote controls. The 2nd is up in the air because I don't think they have a wireless remote yet (didn't two months ago).
The dimmer modules are nice. But the appliance/switch models suck. They're still using relays! Use a triac. I know triacs switch at exactly the wrong time and may put noise into X-10 and Insteon communucations, but regardless, other devices use triacs, so they're just going to have to work around it. And then use triacs themselves.
Other problems: The modules are all switches. If you buy just two dimmer switches for a 3-way system in your hallway, one of them is never used as a switch, yet it has all that switch/dimmer circuitry. Why? It just needs to transmit data.
The software is still a bit wonky. They have multi device control panels that fit in outlet boxes, but using them confuses other devices a bit. For example, one thing you might want on a panel is a button that turns on the light the switch is near and another that turns on all the lights in the house of area (panic). But since the two buttons are on the same device, other devices can't tell them apart very well, so, for example, you can't program one button to turn on the lights partially or smoothly, and the other full on instantly.
The RF modules are a joke too. They are ugly, block an outlet, and don't even behave as a switch to a device plugged into them! And Insteon acts as if you shouldn't use the old RF bridges to connect the legs in your house.
Plus, the switches, even the good ones, are made from cheapo plastic.
All in all, perhaps it'll win out, after all it is better than X-10. But I don't see it really taking off. A good system like this would just plain replace all dumb switches in all future construction. This system just isn't straightforward enough or reliable enough to the user to allow that.
Why doesn't he just fly to New York and turn himself in?
The purpose of Gitmo is to keep those prisoners in a place where they are not actually in the US and thus they can be deprived of many of their Constitutional rights (an argument I don't agree with, by the way, your rights to be protected from our government do not diminish at our borders).
So, if he were just to fly into the US, he would be on US soil, and none of these shenanigans apply. And there's no legal method for extraditing him off of US soil.
The most he would have to fear is federal (pound-me-in-the-ass) prison. And from the article, i sounds like he deserves it.
It also sounds like he has a very high opinion of himself, making himself out to be some kind of nemesis to the US government. This guy appears to have huge delusions of grandeur.
(quoting some Wired one-sentence paragraphs from the article)
"In papers filed late Monday, AT&T argued that confidential technical documents provided by an ex-AT&T technician to the Electronic Frontier Foundation shouldn't be used as evidence in the case and should be returned.
The documents, which the EFF filed under a temporary seal last Wednesday, purportedly detail how AT&T diverts internet traffic to the National Security Agency via a secret room in San Francisco and allege that such rooms exist in other AT&T switching centers."
These papers were filed under seal. Thanks to our government, and despite what the Constution says, you don't have to make documents public anymore to use them in court. AT&T isn't arguing against these documents being disclosed publicly, they are trying to remove them from evidence.
It's not the same, and it doesn't involve trade secrets or anything like that.
Besides, I don't see protection of trade secrets in the Constution. If the EFF has a legitimate Constutional challenge to make here, it trumps AT&T's trade secret protection anyway.
"show me an alternate BMW German dealership finder that isn't BMW?"
If search for BMW I must be looking for a dealership? Again, I disagree that BMW is the only good result when searching for BMW.
What if I'm looking for parts? Service (independent)? BMW's airplane engine division (now sold I think)?
Like I said, that web page isn't always the best result. I'd rank it #1 though, just like Google (usually) does.
As to BMW's page full of graphics Google can't search, well, I didn't see the UN Convention on Human Rights talking about everyone's guarantee for their web site to be ranked accurately in Google regardless of design. If they don't rank well in Google they need to take steps to fix it, and steps that Google isn't going to punish them for. If they use too many graphics for Google to be effective, then they have to take the consequences.
I do agree the reality is that Google doesn't always rank a page the same as a user does if they were to read it. But that is what Google strives for, and they have a business reason to try to convince the authors of significant web pages to play by a set of rules that allows their business of ranking using user-visible text to remain reasonably accurate. So they took steps to try to cajole BMW into playing by those rules that would benefit Google. They succeded, as an 800lb gorilla usually does.
Ask Ford or Mazda (again Ford) about this. Both companies doled out lots of money because they sold cars that didn't make the HP they claimed (Ford Mustang Cobra and Miata, respectively). Infiniti also had to spend a lot of money on their Q45 customers trying to make up what seemed to be a HP deficit (although I don't know if it was ever proven) in the Q45.
Car companies do test their cars, and the HP at the shaft (BHP) is supposed to be at least what is advertised, or else. So usually it is. There was a good story in the Detroit News recently about how companies were retesting their cars under a more standard set of rules now, and the ones that didn't match up well (either over or under). In this case, the companies aren't liable, because it is assumed their cars made the rated HP, but under different testing conditions. This loophole is now closed and cars going foward must be tested independently under these rules.
To buy something from the store with the intention of returning it is fraud. To have the intention to return something else as if it were what you bought is at least as bad (legally).
Please don't think you can use stores as lending libraries.
I don't know if I want to get my reviews from individuals who would defraud stores out of money (handling/restocking fees, turning their stock into non-new stock which doesn't fetch the same price).
I might shop at Wal-Mart if Target didn't exist. I don't love paying more.
But Target does exist, so the problem is solved for me.
And the thing is, refined tastes or no, I don't like stepping into a Wal-Mart, they're anything from borderline dumps to out-and-out dumps.
I have bought one thing from Wal-Mart in my hometown in the last 4 years. I say in my hometown, because when I am in another city, sometimes Wal-Mart is the first thing I find, so I go there. See, it isn't that I hold anything against Wal-Mart and the people who shop there, I just often prefer to shop elsewhere. And I usually do.
Yes, I am aware Target is no better as a corporate citizen in relation to suppliers than Wal-Mart is.
Yes, you send it to the manufactuer. The manufacturer then sends it to a 3rd world country where it isn't really recycled at all, it just sits there and pollutes the enviroment.
That's pretty much the point of the article, and you missed it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sprint rolled out 3G 3 years ago also, and successfully, unlike the early Japan 3G rollout which was aborted and undone.
You're mistakenly putting the US in some kind of phone ghetto.
Yes, I do agree about the what GSM makes it possible not only technically, but in a market fashion to sell phones that have additional features. It really leads the way in this. It's why I use GSM, because I like fancy phones. But for people like my father who don't care about fancy phones, it gets them zero.
I would say that although GSM unquestionably is the strongest force in this trend, and still leads, the other systems pull their weight. Push-to-talk (may all users of it die horrible deaths) didn't start on GSM (it came from iDEN and CDMA 2000 got it 2nd). IS-136 created voicemail notification and caller ID before GSM even started.
CDMA providers don't want this because they would rather sell you features. Sprint made a fair bit of money off selling voice dialing as a service. Putting it in the phone removes revenue. Providers don't want Bluetooth data service (leashing) because it makes it difficult for them to provide "unlimited data service" profitably. They figure you can only push so much data surfing the web on a phone with that awful display and joystick, but with leashing I can push a month's worth of data in an hour from my computer through my phone. Even Danger, with the best browser in the business and always-on AIM IM has to fight with operators over this because customers will easily use more bandwidth than they are really paying for at $20 a month.
Look at camera phones. Providers like camera phones, they even subsidize them, because once you take the picture they figure you have to email it to yourself to save it or let others view it. But with Bluetooth you can just send the pic to your computer next time you are there without paying the operator. So what did Verizon (CDMA operator) do about this? They convinced Motorola to disable the Bluetooth file transfer feature on the v710 phone on Verizon! They want Bluetooth because then they can sell you an overpriced Bluetooth headset accessory, but they didn't want file transfer, so they disabled it.
Now, on GSM they can't stop me, I can buy an unbranded phone (and I do) with loads of features and put my SIM in. On Verizon or Sprint, they only offer what they want, there is virtually no market for phones except through the provider, and if you did happen to find a 3rd party phone, they might not even activate it for you.
I left Verizon because they were controlling the phones too much, a feature never appeared unless they thought it was to their advantage. So no feature appeared until the other operators proved it made sense (they were the last US operator to offer a Bluetooth phone). I felt they were over controlling. Much like the movie industry would have killed the VCR if they could have in the early days (see Jack Valenti's "Boston Strangler" comments), I felt Verizon was not only hurting me, but hurting themselves.
I left Verizon because of this. I went to Sprint, because they had the only CDMA Bluetooth phone in the US (outside of Korea actually). Well, it turned out to be truly terrible (Sony-Ericsson T608) and their coverage sucked too, so I went to GSM and the phones are indeed cool on GSM.
As to your comments about IS-136 being incompatible, your comments are 180 degrees off and typify the complete misunderstanding Europeans have about GSM and why the US is incompatible.
The operator my dad uses (Cingular) was a AMPS operator (well, the component parts of the now merged company) before GSM even existed. They used IS-136 because it was COMPATIBLE, and not GSM because it was designed to be incompatible. Years later this stupid European decision is still hurting people like my dad, because if GSM was compatible, companies who had preexisting customers (i.e. revenue to protect) would have switched to GSM in the mid 90s instead of setting up or continuing with IS-136. And my father wouldn't have been
This idea of online storage was pretty big in the .com days, with Xdrive and such. And yes, there were plenty of drives with warez on them and the passwords sent around via Hotline or whatever.
.Mac too.
The companies had to spend a lot of time policing accounts. Certainly Apple does with
There are a bunch of companies right now that are largely used to pirate files, like megaupload.com or rapidshare.de.
So very good prediction, but you're actually predicting the past, it turns out.
I don't quite see how people can get so righteous about this.
MS has internal business. Some of this includes security. It is their choice whether to release the info or not.
Other companies are making similar decisions. Does Apple ever tell you what is fixed in iPod 1.1.1 software or iTunes 6.0.4?
MS is taking a risk people might not patch. But if they want to take that risk, it's up to them. Why do people just love explaining how they'd do things better than MS all the time?
GSM is outmoded, and the only thing it is doing better for the customer here is providing choice of phones. It doesn't provide as good coverage, as much bandwidth for data users and it's tougher for operators to run!
Having had all 3 major systems here in the US in the last 3 years, I don't see a problem with any of them. I don't know what you heard, but our systems work well. And they have been working well (including my own phone) since before GSM even existed.
The invisible hand has driven out the systems that don't work as well as others (IS-136, and it hasn't been possible to get an AMPS phone activated for two years). It'd drive out the next worst system too, except it can't, the next worst system is GSM.
I do appreciate that Europe regulated in such a way as to make a market for different kinds of phones. That's great. That just doesn't exist on CDMA, because the CDMA operators don't want it, and they can make sure it doesn't happen.
But for someone like my father, who was recently put onto GSM from IS-136 (TDMA), he has nothing but complaints. He doesn't care about fancy phones, and the coverage sucks because GSM was made incompatible with the systems that were already in use and thus he can only use new towers.
GSM is nothing but pain for him, and it's pain because of the boneheaded decisions made in Europe circa 1992 and enforced by law.
You're right about the fees. Is the US the only location with fees all of a sudden? And again, you're getting a lot more stuff bundled in in the US due to the way incoming calls are billed.
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The high cost of phones isn't much different anywhere. Phones cost a lot. They are cheaper everywhere when subsidized, not just in the US. I personally don't like two year contracts, so I don't sign them. My last phone cost $40 with a 1-year cingular contract (which is now expired and I am month to month). You maybe should looked for a more stripped-down phone. High-end phones just cost a lot to make, so they cost a lot to buy.
I have no idea what you mean about how it's difficult to switch carriers. I have switched twice in 3 years. No problems. And if you have you own phone, it's even easier! I purchased my unlocked/unbranded phone and put it on Cingular myself.
See this link:
http://www.sonyericsson.com/spg.jsp?cc=au&lc=en&v
Just put your SIM in, select your country and carrier and click a few times and it sends a text to your phone with the setup info and you press "yes" and you're done. Easy as pie. Of course, it's no easier or tougher in Europe, since this service works worldwide.
We already do get coverage in all the parts where people actually are.
Okay, well, not all parts. I can drive roads in Alpine county where there is no coverage. But Alpine county has a population density of less than 1 person per km^2.
There is some kind of massive misunderstanding being perpetuated here. We have plenty of cell phone coverage in the US. All the 3 major operators service over 98% of the population. The reason maps or other numbers make it look like we don't have coverage here is because Wyoming has 500,000 people in 253,554 km^2. And most of those are in cities. So you see the state on a coverage map and most of it is blank. But that's simply because there's no one to cover there. And it's mountainous, so you can't just do umbrella cells.
Just come to the US West sometime. Go to Wyoming, go to Idaho, go to Montana, go to Utah. Go to California, the most populous states in the nation. Just drive in from the coast or north of San Francisco. Heck go to Alaska. You'll see the magnitude of the idea of covering all the area of the US (or Canada for that matter).
But don't make a mistake. If you actually measure where people live, we have plenty of cell phone coverage in the US, on all 3 systems.
For starters, cell phone usage is cheaper in the US. Even before you consider what you get in terms of free roaming nationwide.
I just checked Orange UK. Let's see, I'd like 200 minutes and 100 texts. That's 25 Pounds. That's about US$40.
Now, let's go to Cingular. Cingular not even being one of the cheaper plans. Let's see what I get for US$40. I get 450 minutes, with lots of night/weekend minutes too! To get that on Orange would cost 40 pounds. And don't forget, if you call a cellular phone in Europe, you have to pay. In the US, not only is the monthly fee of the cellular customer paying for the landline guy to call him free, but if they're both on cellular, there's a chance the call is "free".
I do hear your thing about coverage maps. That's an interesting point. To eliminate those, you not only all need to use the same protocol, you also need to have 100% cross roaming agreements. If there's a single tower out there you can't use, then you are in a "coverage map" situation.
When I was on Verizon (previously GTE) I didn't have any need for coverage maps, I just had coverage everywhere. When I switched to Sprint and then Cingular my coverage dropped, but it's still damn good. Unless you truly go away from the things of man, you're gonna have coverage.
The GSM mandate had some interesting effects. It is what made the massive problems with compatibility. I personally owned an AMPS phone before GSM started up. Why couldn't GSM have been AMPS compatible? The Europeans designed it to be incompatible, and then oddly put the blame on Americans for not using GSM. Well, we already had many customers who would have been hurt by making their ($500+) phones stop working. It simply wasn't an option. The same thing happened in Finland, where AMPS went on quite some time. The US finally eliminates AMPS next year.
I think the GSM mandate worked out in Europe because it helped break the problem with landline operators holding people over a barrel. Landlines were so expensive, cell coverage was cheaper than a landline and so it took off like a rocket and brought a valueable services to the customer. I think a GSM mandate in the US wouldn't have had nearly as many positive effects.
Addititionally, the GSM mandate is really hurting now. GSM is obsolete. It just doesn't have the bandwidth efficiency it needs. And to add insult to injury, the flexibility to add more towers to fix the problem is more limited. CDMA bests it greatly on both cases.
As I make my GSM calls with the GSM half rate codec, I notice how GSM service is noticeably inferior to other options. But in Europe, the law prevents any exploration of any other options. GSM is mandated in all the decent frequency bands (900/1800). 1800 already requires many many cell cites to prevent deadspots, since it can't get through walls well. 3G-type frequncies (2100 in Europe), won't provide any comptition (notably because the same operators own those frequencies).
It's too bad the phones on CDMA suck so bad, and Verizon thinks that phone features are something they should be able to charge for or remove.
Besides wobbling side to side, they also wobble back to front. That is, they can't maintain a proper speed. They invariably slow down as they aren't paying attention and then when they notice, they zoom back up to speed. I've even noticed myself doing this on the phone, which is a big part of why I rarely talk on the phone when driving.
I can tell a driver is on the phone without actually seeing the driver, only the motions of the car. It's pretty characteristic.
I'm shocked it hasn't been more of a problem than it is. We have a lot of traffic around here, and people love to talk on the phone during their commutes. Cell phones must have increased the accident rate, I wonder why it hasn't shown up in the overall statistics.
I was glad when it was made illegal for bus drivers to talk on the cell phone, the thought of what they could do to their cargo and to others with those heavy vehicles is chilling. Restrictions on truck drivers should be next, starting with short haul drivers (local delivery drivers) as they seem to be the worst offenders.
I didn't think the Westinghouse was one of them though. I thought it only accepted 1080i input (same as a Sony SXRD), despite having 1920x1080 resolution.
Note that although the HP accepts 1080p, it isn't true progressive display. There is no such thing as a true 1080p DLP, as 1080-res DLPs use wobleration and thus are inherently interlaced.
Sharp has sold a couple 1080p-inputting, 1080-res, true 1080p output flat panels for a while now, long before the woblerating DLPs came out. These are available affordably up to 45" ($3K), and up to 65" if you can sport $20K for one.
If you have no intention of keeping it when you bought it, then you only pretended to buy it. You had one thing in mind ("borrowing" the item), and you did another (pretended to purchase the item) and it cost someone else money (the company), so you committed fraud. It's that simple.
If a store has to raise their prices to cover someone else's acts of fraud, it bothers me, because it hurts me. And if you owned the company, I'm sure you'd be concerned too.
Crimes aren't okay just because you don't happen to know personally the person you are hurting.
My mod points ran out yesterday, damn it.
Jose isn't in Gitmo. My post was if this fellow is worried about Gitmo, he can avoid it for sure.
I don't agree with Padilla being held for years without trial or being charged, and I don't agree the government should be allowed to hold other people for years without trial just because they aren't on US soil.
What exactly are we fighting for? Our government makes people disappear, and even tortures people (sometimes to death). We're no kind of model of freedom anymore.
Not about this specific case.
Google needs to be able to perform automated page ranking. If people do what BMW does it can easily thwart them.
They're willing to accept a small failure to prevent a large failure of their business model.
You're really not getting this.
Love that. It's so easy to describe.
I take it you have paint still sitting around for every room in your house, so ripping out switches of wall, replacing them, retexturing them and painting them is a snap.
But for some of us, it isn't so easy. Paint matching is very good nowadays, but you still need to paint an area larger than a few feet with the edges right at eye level. Basically, you end up painting an entire wall.
This stuff isn't a snap.
And I don't have neutrals on most of my switches either. I even have ground in every junction box (even switch boxes), but no neutrals in some switch boxes.
Why? Because you don't need them. There's no safety issue or anything.
The neutral runs straight to the light, and only the hot is switched. That's 100% safe, and all that is necessary. Go to home depot and find a light switch. It has 3 terminals. 1 is ground. The other two are interchangeable, but we'll call one "hot in" and the other "intermittent hot out", that is, the terminal that is switched. Where is the neutral connection? It doesn't have one, you don't need it, there's in fact no place to attach it.
It's easy (apparently) for you to say bring this up to code, but doing it is rather difficult.
You're right, that in the end it has to be done, no device that actually draws power can be used in these switch boxes, not just Insteon. But it's still a big impediment to Insteon adoption.
"- Does not rely on sending signals thru the electrical system and all
the problems that go along with that."
Yes it does.
Each switch is only hooked to your power lines and has no radio antenna. How do you think they get and send commands?
The RF units on Insteon is only for bridging and maybe for remote controls. The 2nd is up in the air because I don't think they have a wireless remote yet (didn't two months ago).
The dimmer modules are nice. But the appliance/switch models suck. They're still using relays! Use a triac. I know triacs switch at exactly the wrong time and may put noise into X-10 and Insteon communucations, but regardless, other devices use triacs, so they're just going to have to work around it. And then use triacs themselves.
Other problems:
The modules are all switches. If you buy just two dimmer switches for a 3-way system in your hallway, one of them is never used as a switch, yet it has all that switch/dimmer circuitry. Why? It just needs to transmit data.
The software is still a bit wonky. They have multi device control panels that fit in outlet boxes, but using them confuses other devices a bit. For example, one thing you might want on a panel is a button that turns on the light the switch is near and another that turns on all the lights in the house of area (panic). But since the two buttons are on the same device, other devices can't tell them apart very well, so, for example, you can't program one button to turn on the lights partially or smoothly, and the other full on instantly.
The RF modules are a joke too. They are ugly, block an outlet, and don't even behave as a switch to a device plugged into them! And Insteon acts as if you shouldn't use the old RF bridges to connect the legs in your house.
Plus, the switches, even the good ones, are made from cheapo plastic.
All in all, perhaps it'll win out, after all it is better than X-10. But I don't see it really taking off. A good system like this would just plain replace all dumb switches in all future construction. This system just isn't straightforward enough or reliable enough to the user to allow that.
Why doesn't he just fly to New York and turn himself in?
The purpose of Gitmo is to keep those prisoners in a place where they are not actually in the US and thus they can be deprived of many of their Constitutional rights (an argument I don't agree with, by the way, your rights to be protected from our government do not diminish at our borders).
So, if he were just to fly into the US, he would be on US soil, and none of these shenanigans apply. And there's no legal method for extraditing him off of US soil.
The most he would have to fear is federal (pound-me-in-the-ass) prison. And from the article, i sounds like he deserves it.
It also sounds like he has a very high opinion of himself, making himself out to be some kind of nemesis to the US government. This guy appears to have huge delusions of grandeur.
(quoting some Wired one-sentence paragraphs from the article)
"In papers filed late Monday, AT&T argued that confidential technical documents provided by an ex-AT&T technician to the Electronic Frontier Foundation shouldn't be used as evidence in the case and should be returned.
The documents, which the EFF filed under a temporary seal last Wednesday, purportedly detail how AT&T diverts internet traffic to the National Security Agency via a secret room in San Francisco and allege that such rooms exist in other AT&T switching centers."
These papers were filed under seal. Thanks to our government, and despite what the Constution says, you don't have to make documents public anymore to use them in court. AT&T isn't arguing against these documents being disclosed publicly, they are trying to remove them from evidence.
It's not the same, and it doesn't involve trade secrets or anything like that.
Besides, I don't see protection of trade secrets in the Constution. If the EFF has a legitimate Constutional challenge to make here, it trumps AT&T's trade secret protection anyway.
If you pirate Windows, they'll prevent you from using ONE OF the parts of the OS that sucks up systems resources like there's no tomorrow.
"show me an alternate BMW German dealership finder that isn't BMW?"
If search for BMW I must be looking for a dealership? Again, I disagree that BMW is the only good result when searching for BMW.
What if I'm looking for parts? Service (independent)? BMW's airplane engine division (now sold I think)?
Like I said, that web page isn't always the best result. I'd rank it #1 though, just like Google (usually) does.
As to BMW's page full of graphics Google can't search, well, I didn't see the UN Convention on Human Rights talking about everyone's guarantee for their web site to be ranked accurately in Google regardless of design. If they don't rank well in Google they need to take steps to fix it, and steps that Google isn't going to punish them for. If they use too many graphics for Google to be effective, then they have to take the consequences.
I do agree the reality is that Google doesn't always rank a page the same as a user does if they were to read it. But that is what Google strives for, and they have a business reason to try to convince the authors of significant web pages to play by a set of rules that allows their business of ranking using user-visible text to remain reasonably accurate. So they took steps to try to cajole BMW into playing by those rules that would benefit Google. They succeded, as an 800lb gorilla usually does.
Ask Ford or Mazda (again Ford) about this. Both companies doled out lots of money because they sold cars that didn't make the HP they claimed (Ford Mustang Cobra and Miata, respectively). Infiniti also had to spend a lot of money on their Q45 customers trying to make up what seemed to be a HP deficit (although I don't know if it was ever proven) in the Q45.
Car companies do test their cars, and the HP at the shaft (BHP) is supposed to be at least what is advertised, or else. So usually it is. There was a good story in the Detroit News recently about how companies were retesting their cars under a more standard set of rules now, and the ones that didn't match up well (either over or under). In this case, the companies aren't liable, because it is assumed their cars made the rated HP, but under different testing conditions. This loophole is now closed and cars going foward must be tested independently under these rules.
To buy something from the store with the intention of returning it is fraud. To have the intention to return something else as if it were what you bought is at least as bad (legally).
Please don't think you can use stores as lending libraries.
I don't know if I want to get my reviews from individuals who would defraud stores out of money (handling/restocking fees, turning their stock into non-new stock which doesn't fetch the same price).
I might shop at Wal-Mart if Target didn't exist. I don't love paying more.
But Target does exist, so the problem is solved for me.
And the thing is, refined tastes or no, I don't like stepping into a Wal-Mart, they're anything from borderline dumps to out-and-out dumps.
I have bought one thing from Wal-Mart in my hometown in the last 4 years. I say in my hometown, because when I am in another city, sometimes Wal-Mart is the first thing I find, so I go there. See, it isn't that I hold anything against Wal-Mart and the people who shop there, I just often prefer to shop elsewhere. And I usually do.
Yes, I am aware Target is no better as a corporate citizen in relation to suppliers than Wal-Mart is.
Yes, you send it to the manufactuer. The manufacturer then sends it to a 3rd world country where it isn't really recycled at all, it just sits there and pollutes the enviroment.
That's pretty much the point of the article, and you missed it.