HP hails from Houston? That's a laugh. Yes, they bought Houston's Compaq, basically putting a competitor out of business, but HP was the company that basically hatched Silly Valley from a garage in Palo Alto.
I may be missing some Britishism over hear in the colonies. While "global warming" is the most widely used phrase, it is often "refuted" by those who note incidences of extreme cold and snow. What extra heat in the atmosphere tends to do is add to the strength of storms, but it also moves some atmospheric flows, making the weather weirder -- more variation from average -- than usual. Hence global weirding.
Or do Brits see that as some kind of Shakespearian-era reference to the occult or something?
Selectively picking through the data to create "evidence"
Denialists start with the false premise that everything works in a straightforward, linear fashion, so that anything that deviates from the general direction of the predicted trend, even if the existence of such variation is itself predictable, is taken as "proof" that the science is wrong. Drill, baby, drill; I'll be dead before the planet is uninhabitable, and I don't give a goat's bzadeh about your grandkids.
Global weirding (long term climate) leads to wider variations in (short term) weather. Here in New England, we had a record-breaking snowfall last year, followed by unprecedented floods and even tornadoes (not normal here). Then we had a warm, dry winter and this spring is turning into a big brush fire season. Unlike out west, we have year-round rainfall so underbrush normally decomposes rather than burns, but it burns in drought.
We are treated like cattle at the airport based on the one-in-100-million chance that our shoes or underpants are bombs. Yet a mere 95-out-of-100 chance that global warming is real is not enough to convince the same nitwits who support the fascist surveillance society that doesn't even let us take our deodorant on the plane. Utter hypocrisy.
There is never any justification for using IPv6 for anything, period. It was a colossal mistake in the first place, made after IAB accepted TUBA, then took it back because the k1ddi3z at IETF didn't like it because it was tainted by having been related to OSI. The good folks on the IPNG project left and the B team, given bad instructions, cadged together IPv6. All that before the Internet was a widespread public service.
The correct answer for the intermediate term is to stick with IPv4 and use more NAT and more private addresses. Net 10 is pretty big. NAT only breaks broken applications. View IP addresses as internal to that layer and the application-name as canonical, and suddenly it all works. Besides, a v6 internet won't be as useful as a v4 internet because all public sites are on v4, not all are on v6, so you need v4 anyway, thus v6 will never catch up. Plus v4 space is inefficiently used, so it can last forever with a modest market in address blocks.
In the long term we retire TCP/IP itself and develop a cleaner protocol suite. It was, after all, a 1970s lab project that just worked too well to be thrown out, but it was not meant to scale to today's use.
I still have (as a souvenir) my old Vodafone full sized SIM card. It's about the size of a business card, and fit nicely into a Moto handset. The mini-SIM breaks off of it, to use with, say, post-2000 phones. That's plenty small.
The ore is pretty common; refining has been the issue. China uses old, messy acid-based refining that causes huge waste problems, which they "solve" by laying waste to vast areas of semi-desert land, I think largely in Inner Mongolia. Newer, cleaner processes may be in store for the Mountain Pass, California mine recently reopened.
What the RE industry needs is another Hall process, the discovery that made aluminum cheap. Alas, Neodymium, Samarium, Cerium and friends aren't so easy.
Heartland Institute is one of the larger Washington (okay, it's based in Chicago but it's virtual Washington) stink tanks. Supporting "free-market" ideas, it claims among its closest supporters such right-wing luminaries as Sen. Jim DeMint, Milton Friedman, and Grover Nordquist. Needless to say, it gets funding from fossil-fuel interests.
Typing commands into a shell is a new idea for Unix-based OSs, right?
Auto-completion of commands and programs was a feature of TOPS-20 and its predecessor TENEX, which ran on 36-bit DEC iron in the 1970s. Unix shells were designed for hunt-and-peck geeks, to minimize keystrokes on their 35ASRs. TENEX commands were designed to be user-friendly. I doubt Ubuntu will come close.
Weird Al is still going strong. He does as a policy get permission to use the songs he parodies, but he also says that he does this voluntarily, not because he has to.
US copyright law has an explicit 4-part list of factors to be considered for what is "fair use", and parody is viewed by the courts as falling into one of those categories (commentary, criticism). See the SCOTUS case Acuff v. Campbell for an example.
I wrote a document, text without pictures, in MS Word 2010. I let MS Word write it as PDF and it came to around 300k. I then used the shareware PDF995 PDF-generating printer driver to create a PDF and it was half the size, and looked as good. Same font embedding options too.
PDF is one of those formats that can be used well or badly, and a badly-written file has lots of room for optimization.
Buggy implementations just cause more problems. The basic design of TCP/IP is that every node can reach every other node, and scan its ports for that matter. It was not designed to be open to the public. Think of a giant motel where every single room faces a street in a very bad neighborhood. Not nearly as secure as a building with a lobby, halls, etc., but IP is a motel.
Vint's claim to fame is inventing TCP. Some inventors see their baby as one product to be improved upon, a snapshot in time. Vint sees his as a perpetuity, perfect and never to be replaced. Of course it has many, many flaws, of which security is merely the most egregious.
The ARPANET was the military's, but it was a research net, for a closed community, with host-based security assumed to suffice. There were no networked PCs in 1975! TCP/IP wasn't designed for mission-critical secure use. It is long, long past its sell-by date. Piling hack upon hack onto it is just a stopgap.
(And yes, I suggest looking at RINA at http://www.pouzinsociety.org/ as a substitute.)
Apple and others sell keyboards for iPads. Several vendors sell keyboards for Android tablets too. They use Bluetooth to connect. So just keep one with your fondleslab and you can type away.
I just wish they made a smartphone with a decent phone-type keypad in a clamshell form factor. The old Samsung Alias 2 was a wonderful texting phone, but nothing today is like it. Touch-screen phones are hard to dial on, delicate, and love to pocket-dial.
The -30 dBm is not the transmitter power of the Lightsquared base station, but the received signal strength, using an isotropic radio, at ground level 50 meters away. Since this is some MHz away from the actual GPS satellite frequencies, a decent receiver should be able to sort them out.
Actually, LightSquared's planned Auxiliary Terrestrial operation was approved by the FCC years ago, I think 2003. They just didn't use it for a while. So GPS receiver vendors saved a few pence here and there and built units that do not work near the authorized terrestrial transmiters. Now that LightSquared wants to use its licensed frequencies, the GPS industry has its knickers in a twist.
The high-precision GPS signal is separate from the widely-used one. They are willing to pay to move all of those receivers -- there are fewer than a million -- to a different frequency.
Area code splits are less common in the US now, and overlays are becoming the norm for expansion. The special case in NYC is that 917 was originally an overlay for cellular only, not wireline, and the FCC later banned service-specific overlays. But area codes have split too much, and overlays are far more convenient, even if we have to dial all 10 digits (when not using a speed dial function, of course). In urban areas, the splits got to such small areas that 10-digit calling was too common anyway, just to call the next zone over (notably Los Angeles, which got carved into tiny geographic areas before the California PUC finally got a clue).
Unlike the UK, the US has a fixed-format numbering plan, 3-3-4 digits everywhere. Providers used to be assigned whole 10,000-number prefix-code blocks (NPA-NXX-xxxx), and that led to massive area code exhaust and splitting/overlays. So they went to pooling, where providers get 1000 numbers at a time (NPA-NXX-Dxxx). This has hugely helped, and new area codes are rarely created any more. Carriers have to give back any blocks, after the first one in a rate center, that are <10% full. These blocks are recycled to carriers who need them.
It's all done via the number portability system. A pooled block is essentially 1000 pre-ported numbers. A "contaminated" block (recycled with <10% used but some numbers in service) leaves its existing numbers in place. It works pretty well. So perhaps the UK can move to smaller block assignments.
The article makes it sound like Android is just a fork of Linux for phones. A better description woud be that Android is a smartphone operating system that uses Linux for some boring kernel functions. The real work is done in other parts, like Dalvik (their java-like language virtual machine).
Linux provides a workable free kernel that a lot of programmers are used to. So it gets embedded in a lot of things. What people do in userland above it is none of the kernel's business, so there's no GPL violation when it's closed-source. Linux is most at home in the server world, where it's now the most popular flavor of unix, mainly on price and flexibility. Even Linus doesn't care about the mass-market desktop; unix-type OSs are lousy at that. (MacOS X has a sort of unix-like API layer atop its own Darwin microkernel and below its proprietary Mac-specific layers, but it's again a long way from a plain unix box. Even DEC's VMS could eventually run recompiled Posix applications.) Well, maybe they wouldn't be lousy at it if somebody cared, but it's hard to compete with Windows and MacOS.
The botom 4 MHz of the FM dial in the US is reserved for "noncommercial-educational" stations. No adverts allowed, though "underwriting announcements" are permitted. (It's a fine line, but impacts the tone of the station.) Most are owned by universities (blue states) or churches (red states). Some are independent. There are also now some "low power FM" stations on other frequencies under slightly different rules, but also noncommercial.
The usual funding method is to ask for listener donations. They have pledge drives, sometimes running for a week a few times a year, when programs are interrupted to ask people to phone in pledges, or (more recently) done via the station's web site. Boston's biggest news-oriented radio station (WBUR) works this way; it's owned by Boston University, and raises hundreds of thousands of dollars several times a year. A similar model works for the New York market's funky (it mostly plays non-RIAA music) WFMU, once owned by a now-closed university and now independent.
Is that permitted in the UK? Or are Brits too cheap to shell out a few quid to sponsor their favorite station?
Zeke, you nailed it. It seems to be a beamforming antenna, using centralized processing rather than a processor next to several nearby antennas. So it's combining Distributed Antenna Systems with MIMO beamforming.
There's no Shannon violation, because Shannon's Law refers to actual gaussian noise, unpredicatable stuff. In DIDO, the assumption is that everything is correlated via one CPU, so the unwanted siganls are known, not true noise, and thus can be mathematically cancelled. Of course this assumes that the properties of the path are well known and constant. Don't try this with mobility.
So the claims are grossly overblown and the actual ideas are old, just repackaged. It could theoretically work a little, but in practice won't be all so special.
Distribution of income matters too. If you have a society where the King or equivalent makes all of the money, then the increase in total wealth does not benefit the people, so what's the point? National wealth does not translate to quality of life. American society in particular is becoming iike that, with 1% of the population getting much richer and 80% getting considerably poorer on their behalf. This is where right-wing focus on GDP growth is irrelevant.
Even Lewis can't claim that putting this on the air is not harmful radiation!
I'm impressed that they wrote a "tune" with a single note held over multiple bars, which is bad enough, but then ran her "voice" through an autotuner! She couldn't even hold one note?
and acting as if press reports, from practically everyone else, are exaggerated. Radiation is escaping and the local radiation is preventing people from getting in and fixing things. His wild-eyed optimism is unjustified, and brings disrepute on the news coverage here.
Lewis is displaying truly remarkable denial. Perhaps he'd like to visit the site and, using kitchen tools, take out the spent fuel rods from the boiled-away pool and take them back to his house. On a remote island somewhere.
"At least 15 people have been admitted to hospital with symptoms of radiation poisoning following an accident at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant, the Kyodo news agency said on Sunday."
Plant workers, not neighbors, are the primary ones in danger.
There have already been multiple cases of radiation poisoning, and damage continues to spread. This type of reactor is not particularly safe, nor are other current uranium designs. Apologists should stop trying to claim victory from obvious failure.
Thorium (LFTR) reactors might be much safer; if they dump their molten fuel solution into the holding tank, it freezes and the reaction basically stops.
Alien, BBN never owned Compuserve. It did own the pioneering packet-switched carrier Telenet, selling it to GTE around 1980. It dabbled in all sorts of related technologies over the years.
BBN's biggest attraction to Raytheon was probably its Boomerang shot-spotter. BBN started as an acoustics company (1948) and still has serious military acoustics skill, including this system that uses an array of microphones and some fast computing to determine where a bullet was fired from. Its work is >90% federal, like Raytheon.
And Tel, bear in mind that the Internet evolved from a private Pentagon network. BBN built the ARPAnet starting in 1969. (ARPA=DoD) It became "Internet" in the early 1980s when MILnet became a separate operation, linked to the research (universities, etc.) ARPAnet. Peaceniks have never objected to making non-military use of this technology, regardless of its provenance.
The biggest US ham organization, the ARRL, has been fighting noisy BPL systems for years, but has no problem with the in-home (HomePNA) kit on market here. The vendors, who do pass FCC approval, are careful to notch out the ham bands. It sounds like the UK market hasn't approved anything, or isn't enforcing the law, so unapproved garbage is coming to market instead. We've seen this sort of problem before. Early PCs were very noisy too, but rules were imposed and enforced (that counts), and vendors learned to make them quieter.
IPv6 is one of the biggest fiascos in modern technology history. It was a horrible design that totally avoided the real issues that needed to be addressed. It encourages route proliferation, overloading the backbone. Any objective evaluation would throw it out as a low-quality undergraduate paper. Indeed it was glommed together by the "F-troop" of a committee (the people who knew what they were taking about left the IPNG project because it was being run by the fundies). Yet the IETF and the Internet Magisterium have been peddling this sack of rot since before the Internet was even open to the general public. Nobody's buying.
For what it's worth, most IPv4 addresses are not in use. What are running out are virgin homestead addresses. So what? We sell land that the King once issued to somebody long dead. Why shouldn't IPv4 addresses be recycled? But wait -- IPv6 has NO compatibility with IPv4, so EVERY SITE that uses IPv6 MUST have an IPv4 address or not be reached by IPv4 users. So until 100% of the world is on V6, which even the IPv6 backers think will take a decade, they all need IPv4 addresses anyway. (NAT can help conserve them, regardless of any IPv6 transition.) But if they all have v4 addresses, why go to v6? No chickens or eggs.
The Internet world needs to rethink its protocol suite, and stop listening to the box peddlers who see gold in hardware-intensive, service-intensive disasters like IPv6 and IMS.
What Apple filed was a Preliminary Patent. You can tell by the number, which begins with the year; real patents are in a single sequence. It is not a granted patent, and has not been reviewed by the USPTO yet. It's more of a record of invention. By filing a PP, the inventor can establish a date trail, but then they have to file the real patent application within a year. Then the USPTO decides whether or not to grant it. To be sure, they've granted so awfully daft and unworthy patents lately, but this one is not yet among them.
The whole point of whitespace is to allow someone other than the local telephone company and its affiliates to have some access to the subscriber. Licensing, in the US, means that it gets auctioned off, and that means it always goes to AT&T and Verizon, who already own the bulk of the commercial-mobile spectrum and who have the money to outbid anyone who could possibly compete with them. So the public benefit would be negative.
Congressman Dingell has spent many years carrying the water of the then-SBC (now called AT&T, having bought the venerable name). He is no real friend of the tech community.
I'm astonished at how ignorant you Brits can be about American mobile telephony. You make it sound as if our monthly phone bills are laden with charges from telemarketers! Actually, we have a law against telemarketing calls to mobile phones, and it's rather effective. But in any case, I haven't paid for a domestic mobile phone call in years. I pay about $100/month for a family plan that gives a bucket of minutes (1400/month) to three phones, noting that calls within the same carrier's network (includes the family phones, of course) don't even count. And maybe some times of day; I never come close enough to worry about it.
Oh, and no roaming charges either within the entire US, and no domestic tolls. So now we have college students taking their home-market mobiles with them and using them in lieu of the dorm PBX. A student will use a California phone in New York to call down the hall to a Pennsylvania phone. (Phones have regular local numbers, of course, since they are retail-billed as regular calls.) Same charge (zero) unless they run over the plan limit. And an unlimited plan is now available for about $100/month (for one phone). At current exchange rates that's what, a few quid? ;-)
So our average monthly usage per mobile phone is now over 1000 minutes, and the average per-minute cost is around six little US cents. (Is there a Euro coin worth that little?) And the operators are making money.
Lessee... Exxon made $12B in a quarter, that's a rate of $48B/year, and their equity is $120B. That's a 40% return on equity. Maybe triple what a typical company would hope for. Nice work if you can get it.
It's not a free market. Exxon's boys Dick'n'Dubya blew a trillion of borrowed money to invade Iraq for the primary purpose of reducing the oil supply, thus raising prices. Warmongering scares about Iran raise prices. Russian hanky-panky raises prices. Even with a windfall profits tax, the rate of return on oil investment would be high enough to attract investment.
Americans do have debit cards, though they're less common than credit cards. Indeed there has been controversy over when stores can use "signature debit" (looks a lot like credit) vs. "PIN debit" (looks like ATMs), when the fees differ.
Anyway, there's an American radio show, "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me", that combines quiz questions on the week's news with comedy. One of its features is the Listener Limerick Challenge, wherein the lucky listener who gets to go on the show by phone is asked to fill in the last word of a limerick.
All previous Netscrape-derived browsers, going back at least to the original Mozilla 1 (codenamed Seamonkey) and I think to the Netscape 4 series, had huge memory leaks. They grabbed memory for pages and kept it forever. If you left it up for a week or two, it would get to 300-400 Mbps of working set and never shrink. Some developers clamied this was a "feature" but it was really annoying. Firefox 3 finally keeps its memory profile well under 200 Mbps. It's faster too. Not bug-free but worth the upgrade.
Principles aren't rules; only the latter are legally binding. Nor were the principles adopted via legally-proper rulemaking -- the US has laws about that (the Administrative Procedures Act). And what Comcast did was far less egregious than what other Friends of Kevin do every day, especially compared to what Kevin was setting up his Friends to do. But Kevin hates Comcast and thinks he can play a game. One rule for Us, another "principle" (rule of man, not rule of law) for Them.
The likely result will be a quick appeal to a federal Court of Appeals, who will probably throw it out, but K-Mart himself is planning to return to North Carolina soon, or perhaps become an ILEC industry lobbyist.
For the most part telecom in the US has been a complete disaster since 2001, but the one bright spot is mobile usage. We got it right over a decade ago and you Europeans are sucking the pondwater.
Average mobile usage in the US is now something like 1000 minutes/month at an average net price around a stinkin' dime, which given the exchange rate for ISD (incredible shrinking dollar) means a few old lire, or single-digit Eurocents. It's sold in buckets of two-way usage; for instance I buy my family 1300 minutes/month for three phones. Mobile-mobile usage, at least within a carrier's network, is usually not counted. Incoming minutes count, sure, but they're just plain old local numbers, so the caller doesn't pay either. Overtime minutes are expensive (usually around 40 cents) but that's set up as a penalty to get you to buy the right plan, and many operators now allow some carryover minutes or overtime waivers if you only go over once, or upgrade immediately. So many people give out their mobile numbers as their only numbers and nobody blinks at the cost. I just wish my mobile phone sounded better. Wireline is so much nicer to listen to.
The idea of paying 25 cents a minute to call ANYONE is an outrage to Americans. We don't like paying for a call, period, and we are very gabby.
Carriers do subsidize phones, usually based on a 2-year contract, so the pricing structure has nothing to do with the public's taste in handsets. Unlocked GSM phones will work on the ATT and T-Mobile networks.
The big risk in the US now is that mobile carriers have been consolidating, and there's less competition than before. But nobody wants Euro-style CPP. It would be less popular than $9/gallon gasoline. And people are having a cow over paying $4/gallon.
Comcast is entirely correct on the legalities here. The Administrative Procedures Act dictates how the FCC makes rules. The FCC most specifically does NOT regulate the behavior of ISPs; that's "Title 1 information service" and is unregulated. If they wanted to change that, they'd have to go through a rulemaking proceeding.
BTW, how many of you really want ISP behavior strictly regulated via rules that take years to promulgate or modify? Do you think that maybe spammers would be happy if countermeasures had to be approved via the APA? How would you craft a rule to allow defense against ISPs who allow "pink contracts"? Right now it's okay to just block them, period. Which is a good incentive to not allow pink contracts.
Trying to make people feel good without any substance to it, the FCC put out a namby-pamby statement, but it's not a rule. So it's not enforceable, even if Comcast did violate it, which btw I frankly doubt. Now under an absolute monarchy, the king says something, and it has the weight of law, so OFF WITH HIS HEAD! But the FCC is stil theoretically subject to the APA, even though King George and Regent Dick feel free to behead political opponents and otherwise act outside of the law. So they can't just fine Comcast for violating nothing.
The real problem is that the FCC lifted common carrier obligations from the phone companies, so they no longer have to allow independent ISPs on their DSL. Thus no competition. That's the problem, not any one ISP's behavior.
BTW, I use Comcast service, and have seeded Torrents without problem. It takes effort to trigger their system. End users (Comcast customers) aren't harmed by it. The "victims" are companies like Vuze who want to build a content distribution network out of subscriber PCs and ISP bandwidth. That's an inefficient way to do it, but the inefficient cost is on somebody else's bill.
@Eric Olson: Good point -- in the supermarket parking lot, there are guys who go out and collect shopping carts and bring them back in. Traffic patterns for these wouldn't be random, and they're a bit hard to move all stacked up.
Also, MIT's in a very densely populated neighborhood -- albeit mostly populated with college kids. So parking is really tight. So in Cambridge (MA, US), or maybe Manhattan and London, this sort of thing might reach critical mass. But most Americans and many Europeans live in lower-density neighborhoods or suburbs, and want a car to bring them home.
@Michael: What's a chip & PIN reader? Not found in America! We use credit cards with magnetic strips on the back, and swipe them. Some use PINs, actually, but that's generally limited to debit cards; credit requires signatures (often waived on small purchases like gasoline -- though that's not so small any more).
Playjam, what you describe is no bargain. Austrian PAYG phones still have high incoming charges. So the carrier is making their money from incoming termination charges. That's the trick -- the carrier advertises low rates to ITS subscribers while sticking the cost onto other users' carriers. That's why it's called CPNP, not CPP, inthe WIK report: calling party NETWORK pays.
Also, in the US, calls within a mobile network are usually not billed at all (towards one's plan) and there are often "friends and family" type plans too, which give unmetered usage to a few numbers. But PAYG here is not subsidized by incoming calls, so its minutes are all counted. That makes it somewhat less popular; it's mainly aimed at credit-challenged people who can't get postpay plans, as well as at low users. This is still economically correct.
US model works much better, generates higher usage
I'm rather amazed by the comments here. You Europeans seem to think that we Americans ride horses to work or something.
The American mobile system works much better than the European one. Prices have fallen, penetration has risen, and average usage has skyrocketed. Almost everybody in the US who wants a mobile has one, from at least middle-school age. (A few really remote areas have little or no coverage, but that's a function of terrain and population density.)
Average usage per mobile phone in the US is approaching 1000 minutes/month. I don't have the exact number (Scott Marcus of WIK, who co-wrote that report, probably does -- we are old friends) but it has been rising. We do not see it as paying for incoming calls, either, because we pay so little for mobile usage. Everybody signs up for a bucket-of-minutes rate, except for the prepaid phones (which are also available). So we pay maybe $40/month for 500 minutes, or $65 for 1000 minutes; fully unmetered plans (about $90) have also just arrived. Overtime is expensive, so users make sure their bucket is big enough.
In some major cities, calling volume to and from mobiles exceeds wireline levels. So there's a lot of wireline substitution going on. Mobile phones have regular-looking numbers so you can just give that number out. Numbers are portable, both among wireless carriers and between wireline and wireless. So you can drop your wireline service and keep the number on your mobile.
Telemarketing calls to cell phones are illegal, subject to heavy fines if they're caught. It's up to the telemarketer to figure out if a line is mobile. It still happens, but it's rare, and nobody worries about the minutes, since they're bucketed.
Somebody said that Americans still use pagers because of our mobile rates. That may have been true in, say, 1994, but the pager business has shriveled to vestigial levels. There's no big cost advantage to them. But some locations, like hospitals, don't like cell phones to be turned on (the transmitter might interfere with something), hence pagers.
Many Americans no longer pay domestic long distance charges either. Mobile plans almost never charge for such calls; wireline plans are common too. So it's common for college kids to have home-area cell phones and call each other on them, around the campus, even if the call hairpins through the called party's home area 3000 miles away. It's all included in the plan.
For all of this, the wireless companies are profitable; Verizon and ATT are shriveling on the wireline side but making up for it with wireless profits. Talk about moving to a CPP plan, like Europe has, are about as popular as talk about moving to a Soviet-style planned economy. Our mobile system works. Our wireline system is a regulatory mess, to be sure, and let's not talk about Internet or broadband. Wireless works, it seems, because the current FCC (Cheney-Rove regime) hasn't touched the system that was put in place before them.
Texting is expensive if you don't have a bucket-of-messages plan. Unlike Europe, talk is usually cheaper. But 500-message and even unlimited texting plans are now available; they're popular among young users.
Europe has a lot of diesels, which get good fuel economy, even factoring in the higher carbon density per litre/gallon. But they're verboten in much of the US! Until last year, our diesel fuel had high sulfur, which would destroy the catalytic converters needed for clean diesel engines. That was finally fixed, but then some nitwit (remember who runs the US regime now) came up with a new rule (I don't know what) that again banned even clean diesel cars. So except for a few hundred 2007-model-year European luxury cars imported in late 2006, which fell into a loophole, diesel cars have remained banned in much of the US, including the New England area where I live and California.
Besides, the #2 oil that is used for diesel fuel is used here for home heat, and it's expensive: I pay about $3.50 for heating fuel vs. $3.00 for motor gasoline, only the latter including tax. This is the reverse of the historic norm, implying a shortage of the #2 grade.
Because of regenerative braking and time spend idling at traffic lights and in congestion, hybrids (which don't run the engine when stopped) do much better in city driving than gasoline engines. That makes them a good choice for urban drivers. Diesel-electric hybrid would be even better, I suppose, if they'd allow it. That's what most American trains run on..
Let's not make up facts. The 800 MHz cellular band is in full use in the US, mostly by Verizon Wireless and ATT Mobility, who've bought up most of the A and B block original licensees. The 902-928 MHz band is used by many things besides unlicensed data. (Like 2.4 GHz, its primary use is "ISM" -- industrial heating, motion detectors, and other non-information transmitters.)
Microsoft's original prototype was obviously broken. (It was from Microsoft. What did you expect?) Now they're shipping a Service Pack version to the FCC. Other manufacturers can also build them.
It would be unacceptable for a whitespace device to cause "TVI", but that's really a trivial technical problem. DTV transmitters are spaced far enough apart ot leave lots and lots of room. I think the broadcasters are hoping to get permission some day to convert their broadcast frequencies to some other use, and are trying to forestall conflicts.
I have worked with KK Ramakrishnan and as traffic and queuing experts go, he's one of the best. The study appears to be valid within its assumptions. And its assumption is that you have loss-sensitive flows an non-loss-sensitive flows, which is quite valid. So two ways to handle this are a) handle them differently, or b) overprovision so that nobody gets loss. Well guess what folks -- answer b requires a lot more capacity! I think this is so obvious that it's amazing that people don't accept it -- they're so hung up on the vague notion of "neutrality" that they start denying any math that seems to go against a very fundamentalist "best effort for everything" view.
The real issue around neutrality is not allowing different applications to request different treatment. The problem is when the *network operator* makes that decision. Some networks are starting to deploy Deep Packet Inspection, essentially wiretapping of the customer payload, to do either/both of deciding on how to handle the packets, and how much to charge. For instance DPI vendors have proposed charging a fee for wireless connections to email servers other than the network operator's, because this competes with high-cost SMS. And ATT has talked about taking a value-based cut out of ecommerce transactions passing over their wires! And imagine censoring the news based on the network operators' preference or kickbacks. "No BBC for you, chump, we got Fox!" This is the type of thing that is entirely legal now. Once Big Ed Whitacre at SBC started blabbing about those plans, the spin doctors recovered by trying to distract the conversation onto video prioritization. That's a distraction.
This is probably evidence of bad pricing practices on the part of UK (and other EU) mobile carriers. Sure, when it was brandy-new technology and every mobile second was precious, they could justify those rates, but nowadays it's just a ripoff, using the terminating monopoly to gouge CPP.
Here in the US, mobile usage is skyrocketing. Most people are on block-of-airtime plans, which often exempt in-network and off-hours calls. Some smaller carriers now provide totally unmetered service, which is popular with young people who don't even have a land line. (Land lines here are also usually unmetered, at least for "local" calls.) The result is that wireless carriers in some markets are generating more minutes of use than the wireline carriers!
I think a lot of the growth in the US is due to the wireless carriers' generally competitive mindset. Most markets have about four carriers, just enough to keep them on their toes. (FCC Chairman K-Mart is trying to get that down to three, so they can become monopolistic too, but fourth place T-Mobile is doggedly fighting on.) Wireline providers are less competitive here. And it sounds as if wireless providers in Europe are more interested in gouging for what minutes they can sell rather than in really competing hard.
Doesn't apply to cable, but may apply to web browsing, email, etc.
The Verizon patents would not apply to cable telephony, as the cable companies do not use the Internet. They use IP encapsulation, but PacketCable handles the calls differently.
IP encapsulation of voice is not at issue. The patents instead cover DNS and ENUM, the translation of names (including phone numbers) to IP addresses. One patent is about having multiple choices, which is what's done with MX records in email.
Now obviously DNS is not novel -- but the judge didn't seem to care about prior art, and neither does the patent office. ENUM's a standard, again probably the patent filing. So the patents are trash. But then so are a lot of patents in the United States. Someone has to take the time and spend the money to get these overturned, of course, and the FUD is what Verizon wants, to use bad patents as a weapon against competition.
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HP hails from Houston? That's a laugh. Yes, they bought Houston's Compaq, basically putting a competitor out of business, but HP was the company that basically hatched Silly Valley from a garage in Palo Alto.
What does weirding have to do with religion?
I may be missing some Britishism over hear in the colonies. While "global warming" is the most widely used phrase, it is often "refuted" by those who note incidences of extreme cold and snow. What extra heat in the atmosphere tends to do is add to the strength of storms, but it also moves some atmospheric flows, making the weather weirder -- more variation from average -- than usual. Hence global weirding.
Or do Brits see that as some kind of Shakespearian-era reference to the occult or something?
Selectively picking through the data to create "evidence"
Denialists start with the false premise that everything works in a straightforward, linear fashion, so that anything that deviates from the general direction of the predicted trend, even if the existence of such variation is itself predictable, is taken as "proof" that the science is wrong. Drill, baby, drill; I'll be dead before the planet is uninhabitable, and I don't give a goat's bzadeh about your grandkids.
Global weirding (long term climate) leads to wider variations in (short term) weather. Here in New England, we had a record-breaking snowfall last year, followed by unprecedented floods and even tornadoes (not normal here). Then we had a warm, dry winter and this spring is turning into a big brush fire season. Unlike out west, we have year-round rainfall so underbrush normally decomposes rather than burns, but it burns in drought.
We are treated like cattle at the airport based on the one-in-100-million chance that our shoes or underpants are bombs. Yet a mere 95-out-of-100 chance that global warming is real is not enough to convince the same nitwits who support the fascist surveillance society that doesn't even let us take our deodorant on the plane. Utter hypocrisy.
A total waste of time and money
There is never any justification for using IPv6 for anything, period. It was a colossal mistake in the first place, made after IAB accepted TUBA, then took it back because the k1ddi3z at IETF didn't like it because it was tainted by having been related to OSI. The good folks on the IPNG project left and the B team, given bad instructions, cadged together IPv6. All that before the Internet was a widespread public service.
The correct answer for the intermediate term is to stick with IPv4 and use more NAT and more private addresses. Net 10 is pretty big. NAT only breaks broken applications. View IP addresses as internal to that layer and the application-name as canonical, and suddenly it all works. Besides, a v6 internet won't be as useful as a v4 internet because all public sites are on v4, not all are on v6, so you need v4 anyway, thus v6 will never catch up. Plus v4 space is inefficiently used, so it can last forever with a modest market in address blocks.
In the long term we retire TCP/IP itself and develop a cleaner protocol suite. It was, after all, a 1970s lab project that just worked too well to be thrown out, but it was not meant to scale to today's use.
Re: Is size really an issue?
I still have (as a souvenir) my old Vodafone full sized SIM card. It's about the size of a business card, and fit nicely into a Moto handset. The mini-SIM breaks off of it, to use with, say, post-2000 phones. That's plenty small.
The ore is pretty common; refining has been the issue. China uses old, messy acid-based refining that causes huge waste problems, which they "solve" by laying waste to vast areas of semi-desert land, I think largely in Inner Mongolia. Newer, cleaner processes may be in store for the Mountain Pass, California mine recently reopened.
What the RE industry needs is another Hall process, the discovery that made aluminum cheap. Alas, Neodymium, Samarium, Cerium and friends aren't so easy.
Re: clue me in
Heartland Institute is one of the larger Washington (okay, it's based in Chicago but it's virtual Washington) stink tanks. Supporting "free-market" ideas, it claims among its closest supporters such right-wing luminaries as Sen. Jim DeMint, Milton Friedman, and Grover Nordquist. Needless to say, it gets funding from fossil-fuel interests.
Gee. let's call is a "shell"
Typing commands into a shell is a new idea for Unix-based OSs, right?
Auto-completion of commands and programs was a feature of TOPS-20 and its predecessor TENEX, which ran on 36-bit DEC iron in the 1970s. Unix shells were designed for hunt-and-peck geeks, to minimize keystrokes on their 35ASRs. TENEX commands were designed to be user-friendly. I doubt Ubuntu will come close.
Weird Al is still going strong. He does as a policy get permission to use the songs he parodies, but he also says that he does this voluntarily, not because he has to.
US copyright law has an explicit 4-part list of factors to be considered for what is "fair use", and parody is viewed by the courts as falling into one of those categories (commentary, criticism). See the SCOTUS case Acuff v. Campbell for an example.
I wrote a document, text without pictures, in MS Word 2010. I let MS Word write it as PDF and it came to around 300k. I then used the shareware PDF995 PDF-generating printer driver to create a PDF and it was half the size, and looked as good. Same font embedding options too.
PDF is one of those formats that can be used well or badly, and a badly-written file has lots of room for optimization.
No, it's wide open by design
Buggy implementations just cause more problems. The basic design of TCP/IP is that every node can reach every other node, and scan its ports for that matter. It was not designed to be open to the public. Think of a giant motel where every single room faces a street in a very bad neighborhood. Not nearly as secure as a building with a lobby, halls, etc., but IP is a motel.
Of course he's wrong...
Vint's claim to fame is inventing TCP. Some inventors see their baby as one product to be improved upon, a snapshot in time. Vint sees his as a perpetuity, perfect and never to be replaced. Of course it has many, many flaws, of which security is merely the most egregious.
The ARPANET was the military's, but it was a research net, for a closed community, with host-based security assumed to suffice. There were no networked PCs in 1975! TCP/IP wasn't designed for mission-critical secure use. It is long, long past its sell-by date. Piling hack upon hack onto it is just a stopgap.
(And yes, I suggest looking at RINA at http://www.pouzinsociety.org/ as a substitute.)
Just buy a freakin' keyboard
Apple and others sell keyboards for iPads. Several vendors sell keyboards for Android tablets too. They use Bluetooth to connect. So just keep one with your fondleslab and you can type away.
I just wish they made a smartphone with a decent phone-type keypad in a clamshell form factor. The old Samsung Alias 2 was a wonderful texting phone, but nothing today is like it. Touch-screen phones are hard to dial on, delicate, and love to pocket-dial.
Area 51 UFO?
The locals seeing this fly by must have wondered if yet another UFO was in the Nevada skies, in the neighborhood of Area 51. Unidentified flying what?
Received power on the ground
The -30 dBm is not the transmitter power of the Lightsquared base station, but the received signal strength, using an isotropic radio, at ground level 50 meters away. Since this is some MHz away from the actual GPS satellite frequencies, a decent receiver should be able to sort them out.
Authorized years ago
Actually, LightSquared's planned Auxiliary Terrestrial operation was approved by the FCC years ago, I think 2003. They just didn't use it for a while. So GPS receiver vendors saved a few pence here and there and built units that do not work near the authorized terrestrial transmiters. Now that LightSquared wants to use its licensed frequencies, the GPS industry has its knickers in a twist.
The high-precision GPS signal is separate from the widely-used one. They are willing to pay to move all of those receivers -- there are fewer than a million -- to a different frequency.
Overlays are now the norm
Area code splits are less common in the US now, and overlays are becoming the norm for expansion. The special case in NYC is that 917 was originally an overlay for cellular only, not wireline, and the FCC later banned service-specific overlays. But area codes have split too much, and overlays are far more convenient, even if we have to dial all 10 digits (when not using a speed dial function, of course). In urban areas, the splits got to such small areas that 10-digit calling was too common anyway, just to call the next zone over (notably Los Angeles, which got carved into tiny geographic areas before the California PUC finally got a clue).
Smaller-block pooling helped in the US
Unlike the UK, the US has a fixed-format numbering plan, 3-3-4 digits everywhere. Providers used to be assigned whole 10,000-number prefix-code blocks (NPA-NXX-xxxx), and that led to massive area code exhaust and splitting/overlays. So they went to pooling, where providers get 1000 numbers at a time (NPA-NXX-Dxxx). This has hugely helped, and new area codes are rarely created any more. Carriers have to give back any blocks, after the first one in a rate center, that are <10% full. These blocks are recycled to carriers who need them.
It's all done via the number portability system. A pooled block is essentially 1000 pre-ported numbers. A "contaminated" block (recycled with <10% used but some numbers in service) leaves its existing numbers in place. It works pretty well. So perhaps the UK can move to smaller block assignments.
Android is a lot more than Linux
The article makes it sound like Android is just a fork of Linux for phones. A better description woud be that Android is a smartphone operating system that uses Linux for some boring kernel functions. The real work is done in other parts, like Dalvik (their java-like language virtual machine).
Linux provides a workable free kernel that a lot of programmers are used to. So it gets embedded in a lot of things. What people do in userland above it is none of the kernel's business, so there's no GPL violation when it's closed-source. Linux is most at home in the server world, where it's now the most popular flavor of unix, mainly on price and flexibility. Even Linus doesn't care about the mass-market desktop; unix-type OSs are lousy at that. (MacOS X has a sort of unix-like API layer atop its own Darwin microkernel and below its proprietary Mac-specific layers, but it's again a long way from a plain unix box. Even DEC's VMS could eventually run recompiled Posix applications.) Well, maybe they wouldn't be lousy at it if somebody cared, but it's hard to compete with Windows and MacOS.
The US has lots of listener-funded stations
The botom 4 MHz of the FM dial in the US is reserved for "noncommercial-educational" stations. No adverts allowed, though "underwriting announcements" are permitted. (It's a fine line, but impacts the tone of the station.) Most are owned by universities (blue states) or churches (red states). Some are independent. There are also now some "low power FM" stations on other frequencies under slightly different rules, but also noncommercial.
The usual funding method is to ask for listener donations. They have pledge drives, sometimes running for a week a few times a year, when programs are interrupted to ask people to phone in pledges, or (more recently) done via the station's web site. Boston's biggest news-oriented radio station (WBUR) works this way; it's owned by Boston University, and raises hundreds of thousands of dollars several times a year. A similar model works for the New York market's funky (it mostly plays non-RIAA music) WFMU, once owned by a now-closed university and now independent.
Is that permitted in the UK? Or are Brits too cheap to shell out a few quid to sponsor their favorite station?
Hardly unbiased sources
Quoting Naughton and Mueller on the GPL is a bit ridiculous, like quoting Benyamin Netanyahu about Ramadan, or Rick Perry on the scientific method.
MIMO with DAS
Zeke, you nailed it. It seems to be a beamforming antenna, using centralized processing rather than a processor next to several nearby antennas. So it's combining Distributed Antenna Systems with MIMO beamforming.
There's no Shannon violation, because Shannon's Law refers to actual gaussian noise, unpredicatable stuff. In DIDO, the assumption is that everything is correlated via one CPU, so the unwanted siganls are known, not true noise, and thus can be mathematically cancelled. Of course this assumes that the properties of the path are well known and constant. Don't try this with mobility.
So the claims are grossly overblown and the actual ideas are old, just repackaged. It could theoretically work a little, but in practice won't be all so special.
Total size of the economy is not all that matters
Distribution of income matters too. If you have a society where the King or equivalent makes all of the money, then the increase in total wealth does not benefit the people, so what's the point? National wealth does not translate to quality of life. American society in particular is becoming iike that, with 1% of the population getting much richer and 80% getting considerably poorer on their behalf. This is where right-wing focus on GDP growth is irrelevant.
One note wonder
Even Lewis can't claim that putting this on the air is not harmful radiation!
I'm impressed that they wrote a "tune" with a single note held over multiple bars, which is bad enough, but then ran her "voice" through an autotuner! She couldn't even hold one note?
He is downplaying the risk
and acting as if press reports, from practically everyone else, are exaggerated. Radiation is escaping and the local radiation is preventing people from getting in and fixing things. His wild-eyed optimism is unjustified, and brings disrepute on the news coverage here.
What a river in Egypt!
Lewis is displaying truly remarkable denial. Perhaps he'd like to visit the site and, using kitchen tools, take out the spent fuel rods from the boiled-away pool and take them back to his house. On a remote island somewhere.
Press reports are of multiple cases
Like this story
http://en.rian.ru/world/20110313/162978555.html
"At least 15 people have been admitted to hospital with symptoms of radiation poisoning following an accident at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant, the Kyodo news agency said on Sunday."
Plant workers, not neighbors, are the primary ones in danger.
Hardly a great success
With triumphs like this, who needs disasters?
There have already been multiple cases of radiation poisoning, and damage continues to spread. This type of reactor is not particularly safe, nor are other current uranium designs. Apologists should stop trying to claim victory from obvious failure.
Thorium (LFTR) reactors might be much safer; if they dump their molten fuel solution into the holding tank, it freezes and the reaction basically stops.
Owned Telenet
Alien, BBN never owned Compuserve. It did own the pioneering packet-switched carrier Telenet, selling it to GTE around 1980. It dabbled in all sorts of related technologies over the years.
BBN's biggest attraction to Raytheon was probably its Boomerang shot-spotter. BBN started as an acoustics company (1948) and still has serious military acoustics skill, including this system that uses an array of microphones and some fast computing to determine where a bullet was fired from. Its work is >90% federal, like Raytheon.
And Tel, bear in mind that the Internet evolved from a private Pentagon network. BBN built the ARPAnet starting in 1969. (ARPA=DoD) It became "Internet" in the early 1980s when MILnet became a separate operation, linked to the research (universities, etc.) ARPAnet. Peaceniks have never objected to making non-military use of this technology, regardless of its provenance.
HearSee you in courtLess a problem in the states
The biggest US ham organization, the ARRL, has been fighting noisy BPL systems for years, but has no problem with the in-home (HomePNA) kit on market here. The vendors, who do pass FCC approval, are careful to notch out the ham bands. It sounds like the UK market hasn't approved anything, or isn't enforcing the law, so unapproved garbage is coming to market instead. We've seen this sort of problem before. Early PCs were very noisy too, but rules were imposed and enforced (that counts), and vendors learned to make them quieter.
Well, no, it's not coming
IPv6 is one of the biggest fiascos in modern technology history. It was a horrible design that totally avoided the real issues that needed to be addressed. It encourages route proliferation, overloading the backbone. Any objective evaluation would throw it out as a low-quality undergraduate paper. Indeed it was glommed together by the "F-troop" of a committee (the people who knew what they were taking about left the IPNG project because it was being run by the fundies). Yet the IETF and the Internet Magisterium have been peddling this sack of rot since before the Internet was even open to the general public. Nobody's buying.
For what it's worth, most IPv4 addresses are not in use. What are running out are virgin homestead addresses. So what? We sell land that the King once issued to somebody long dead. Why shouldn't IPv4 addresses be recycled? But wait -- IPv6 has NO compatibility with IPv4, so EVERY SITE that uses IPv6 MUST have an IPv4 address or not be reached by IPv4 users. So until 100% of the world is on V6, which even the IPv6 backers think will take a decade, they all need IPv4 addresses anyway. (NAT can help conserve them, regardless of any IPv6 transition.) But if they all have v4 addresses, why go to v6? No chickens or eggs.
The Internet world needs to rethink its protocol suite, and stop listening to the box peddlers who see gold in hardware-intensive, service-intensive disasters like IPv6 and IMS.
Not a patent yet
What Apple filed was a Preliminary Patent. You can tell by the number, which begins with the year; real patents are in a single sequence. It is not a granted patent, and has not been reviewed by the USPTO yet. It's more of a record of invention. By filing a PP, the inventor can establish a date trail, but then they have to file the real patent application within a year. Then the USPTO decides whether or not to grant it. To be sure, they've granted so awfully daft and unworthy patents lately, but this one is not yet among them.
licensing makes no sense
The whole point of whitespace is to allow someone other than the local telephone company and its affiliates to have some access to the subscriber. Licensing, in the US, means that it gets auctioned off, and that means it always goes to AT&T and Verizon, who already own the bulk of the commercial-mobile spectrum and who have the money to outbid anyone who could possibly compete with them. So the public benefit would be negative.
Congressman Dingell has spent many years carrying the water of the then-SBC (now called AT&T, having bought the venerable name). He is no real friend of the tech community.
Works very well here in the Colonies
I'm astonished at how ignorant you Brits can be about American mobile telephony. You make it sound as if our monthly phone bills are laden with charges from telemarketers! Actually, we have a law against telemarketing calls to mobile phones, and it's rather effective. But in any case, I haven't paid for a domestic mobile phone call in years. I pay about $100/month for a family plan that gives a bucket of minutes (1400/month) to three phones, noting that calls within the same carrier's network (includes the family phones, of course) don't even count. And maybe some times of day; I never come close enough to worry about it.
Oh, and no roaming charges either within the entire US, and no domestic tolls. So now we have college students taking their home-market mobiles with them and using them in lieu of the dorm PBX. A student will use a California phone in New York to call down the hall to a Pennsylvania phone. (Phones have regular local numbers, of course, since they are retail-billed as regular calls.) Same charge (zero) unless they run over the plan limit. And an unlimited plan is now available for about $100/month (for one phone). At current exchange rates that's what, a few quid? ;-)
So our average monthly usage per mobile phone is now over 1000 minutes, and the average per-minute cost is around six little US cents. (Is there a Euro coin worth that little?) And the operators are making money.
Shot down by your own numbers
Lessee... Exxon made $12B in a quarter, that's a rate of $48B/year, and their equity is $120B. That's a 40% return on equity. Maybe triple what a typical company would hope for. Nice work if you can get it.
It's not a free market. Exxon's boys Dick'n'Dubya blew a trillion of borrowed money to invade Iraq for the primary purpose of reducing the oil supply, thus raising prices. Warmongering scares about Iran raise prices. Russian hanky-panky raises prices. Even with a windfall profits tax, the rate of return on oil investment would be high enough to attract investment.
There's a word for it
Americans do have debit cards, though they're less common than credit cards. Indeed there has been controversy over when stores can use "signature debit" (looks a lot like credit) vs. "PIN debit" (looks like ATMs), when the fees differ.
Anyway, there's an American radio show, "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me", that combines quiz questions on the week's news with comedy. One of its features is the Listener Limerick Challenge, wherein the lucky listener who gets to go on the show by phone is asked to fill in the last word of a limerick.
An Englishman once was bereft
That his wallet was missing some heft.
"Free" trial from Apple
is something this chap will
More likely say really was ___
FF3 is much better on memory
All previous Netscrape-derived browsers, going back at least to the original Mozilla 1 (codenamed Seamonkey) and I think to the Netscape 4 series, had huge memory leaks. They grabbed memory for pages and kept it forever. If you left it up for a week or two, it would get to 300-400 Mbps of working set and never shrink. Some developers clamied this was a "feature" but it was really annoying. Firefox 3 finally keeps its memory profile well under 200 Mbps. It's faster too. Not bug-free but worth the upgrade.
Martin's just pandering to the cameras
Principles aren't rules; only the latter are legally binding. Nor were the principles adopted via legally-proper rulemaking -- the US has laws about that (the Administrative Procedures Act). And what Comcast did was far less egregious than what other Friends of Kevin do every day, especially compared to what Kevin was setting up his Friends to do. But Kevin hates Comcast and thinks he can play a game. One rule for Us, another "principle" (rule of man, not rule of law) for Them.
The likely result will be a quick appeal to a federal Court of Appeals, who will probably throw it out, but K-Mart himself is planning to return to North Carolina soon, or perhaps become an ILEC industry lobbyist.
American model a success
For the most part telecom in the US has been a complete disaster since 2001, but the one bright spot is mobile usage. We got it right over a decade ago and you Europeans are sucking the pondwater.
Average mobile usage in the US is now something like 1000 minutes/month at an average net price around a stinkin' dime, which given the exchange rate for ISD (incredible shrinking dollar) means a few old lire, or single-digit Eurocents. It's sold in buckets of two-way usage; for instance I buy my family 1300 minutes/month for three phones. Mobile-mobile usage, at least within a carrier's network, is usually not counted. Incoming minutes count, sure, but they're just plain old local numbers, so the caller doesn't pay either. Overtime minutes are expensive (usually around 40 cents) but that's set up as a penalty to get you to buy the right plan, and many operators now allow some carryover minutes or overtime waivers if you only go over once, or upgrade immediately. So many people give out their mobile numbers as their only numbers and nobody blinks at the cost. I just wish my mobile phone sounded better. Wireline is so much nicer to listen to.
The idea of paying 25 cents a minute to call ANYONE is an outrage to Americans. We don't like paying for a call, period, and we are very gabby.
Carriers do subsidize phones, usually based on a 2-year contract, so the pricing structure has nothing to do with the public's taste in handsets. Unlocked GSM phones will work on the ATT and T-Mobile networks.
The big risk in the US now is that mobile carriers have been consolidating, and there's less competition than before. But nobody wants Euro-style CPP. It would be less popular than $9/gallon gasoline. And people are having a cow over paying $4/gallon.
Finally, a real semiconductor
Asimo reminds me of the old joke about Lawrence Welk.
Rule of law vs. rule of men
Comcast is entirely correct on the legalities here. The Administrative Procedures Act dictates how the FCC makes rules. The FCC most specifically does NOT regulate the behavior of ISPs; that's "Title 1 information service" and is unregulated. If they wanted to change that, they'd have to go through a rulemaking proceeding.
BTW, how many of you really want ISP behavior strictly regulated via rules that take years to promulgate or modify? Do you think that maybe spammers would be happy if countermeasures had to be approved via the APA? How would you craft a rule to allow defense against ISPs who allow "pink contracts"? Right now it's okay to just block them, period. Which is a good incentive to not allow pink contracts.
Trying to make people feel good without any substance to it, the FCC put out a namby-pamby statement, but it's not a rule. So it's not enforceable, even if Comcast did violate it, which btw I frankly doubt. Now under an absolute monarchy, the king says something, and it has the weight of law, so OFF WITH HIS HEAD! But the FCC is stil theoretically subject to the APA, even though King George and Regent Dick feel free to behead political opponents and otherwise act outside of the law. So they can't just fine Comcast for violating nothing.
The real problem is that the FCC lifted common carrier obligations from the phone companies, so they no longer have to allow independent ISPs on their DSL. Thus no competition. That's the problem, not any one ISP's behavior.
BTW, I use Comcast service, and have seeded Torrents without problem. It takes effort to trigger their system. End users (Comcast customers) aren't harmed by it. The "victims" are companies like Vuze who want to build a content distribution network out of subscriber PCs and ISP bandwidth. That's an inefficient way to do it, but the inefficient cost is on somebody else's bill.
Lots of bad ideas here
@Eric Olson: Good point -- in the supermarket parking lot, there are guys who go out and collect shopping carts and bring them back in. Traffic patterns for these wouldn't be random, and they're a bit hard to move all stacked up.
Also, MIT's in a very densely populated neighborhood -- albeit mostly populated with college kids. So parking is really tight. So in Cambridge (MA, US), or maybe Manhattan and London, this sort of thing might reach critical mass. But most Americans and many Europeans live in lower-density neighborhoods or suburbs, and want a car to bring them home.
@Michael: What's a chip & PIN reader? Not found in America! We use credit cards with magnetic strips on the back, and swipe them. Some use PINs, actually, but that's generally limited to debit cards; credit requires signatures (often waived on small purchases like gasoline -- though that's not so small any more).
Familiar game to Linux users
It reminds me of Tux Racer (a/k/a Planet Penguin Racer). Much more realistic input, of course.
@playjam
Playjam, what you describe is no bargain. Austrian PAYG phones still have high incoming charges. So the carrier is making their money from incoming termination charges. That's the trick -- the carrier advertises low rates to ITS subscribers while sticking the cost onto other users' carriers. That's why it's called CPNP, not CPP, inthe WIK report: calling party NETWORK pays.
Also, in the US, calls within a mobile network are usually not billed at all (towards one's plan) and there are often "friends and family" type plans too, which give unmetered usage to a few numbers. But PAYG here is not subsidized by incoming calls, so its minutes are all counted. That makes it somewhat less popular; it's mainly aimed at credit-challenged people who can't get postpay plans, as well as at low users. This is still economically correct.
US model works much better, generates higher usage
I'm rather amazed by the comments here. You Europeans seem to think that we Americans ride horses to work or something.
The American mobile system works much better than the European one. Prices have fallen, penetration has risen, and average usage has skyrocketed. Almost everybody in the US who wants a mobile has one, from at least middle-school age. (A few really remote areas have little or no coverage, but that's a function of terrain and population density.)
Average usage per mobile phone in the US is approaching 1000 minutes/month. I don't have the exact number (Scott Marcus of WIK, who co-wrote that report, probably does -- we are old friends) but it has been rising. We do not see it as paying for incoming calls, either, because we pay so little for mobile usage. Everybody signs up for a bucket-of-minutes rate, except for the prepaid phones (which are also available). So we pay maybe $40/month for 500 minutes, or $65 for 1000 minutes; fully unmetered plans (about $90) have also just arrived. Overtime is expensive, so users make sure their bucket is big enough.
In some major cities, calling volume to and from mobiles exceeds wireline levels. So there's a lot of wireline substitution going on. Mobile phones have regular-looking numbers so you can just give that number out. Numbers are portable, both among wireless carriers and between wireline and wireless. So you can drop your wireline service and keep the number on your mobile.
Telemarketing calls to cell phones are illegal, subject to heavy fines if they're caught. It's up to the telemarketer to figure out if a line is mobile. It still happens, but it's rare, and nobody worries about the minutes, since they're bucketed.
Somebody said that Americans still use pagers because of our mobile rates. That may have been true in, say, 1994, but the pager business has shriveled to vestigial levels. There's no big cost advantage to them. But some locations, like hospitals, don't like cell phones to be turned on (the transmitter might interfere with something), hence pagers.
Many Americans no longer pay domestic long distance charges either. Mobile plans almost never charge for such calls; wireline plans are common too. So it's common for college kids to have home-area cell phones and call each other on them, around the campus, even if the call hairpins through the called party's home area 3000 miles away. It's all included in the plan.
For all of this, the wireless companies are profitable; Verizon and ATT are shriveling on the wireline side but making up for it with wireless profits. Talk about moving to a CPP plan, like Europe has, are about as popular as talk about moving to a Soviet-style planned economy. Our mobile system works. Our wireline system is a regulatory mess, to be sure, and let's not talk about Internet or broadband. Wireless works, it seems, because the current FCC (Cheney-Rove regime) hasn't touched the system that was put in place before them.
Texting is expensive if you don't have a bucket-of-messages plan. Unlike Europe, talk is usually cheaper. But 500-message and even unlimited texting plans are now available; they're popular among young users.
US market quite different
Europe has a lot of diesels, which get good fuel economy, even factoring in the higher carbon density per litre/gallon. But they're verboten in much of the US! Until last year, our diesel fuel had high sulfur, which would destroy the catalytic converters needed for clean diesel engines. That was finally fixed, but then some nitwit (remember who runs the US regime now) came up with a new rule (I don't know what) that again banned even clean diesel cars. So except for a few hundred 2007-model-year European luxury cars imported in late 2006, which fell into a loophole, diesel cars have remained banned in much of the US, including the New England area where I live and California.
Besides, the #2 oil that is used for diesel fuel is used here for home heat, and it's expensive: I pay about $3.50 for heating fuel vs. $3.00 for motor gasoline, only the latter including tax. This is the reverse of the historic norm, implying a shortage of the #2 grade.
Because of regenerative braking and time spend idling at traffic lights and in congestion, hybrids (which don't run the engine when stopped) do much better in city driving than gasoline engines. That makes them a good choice for urban drivers. Diesel-electric hybrid would be even better, I suppose, if they'd allow it. That's what most American trains run on..
800 MHz band is still in use, Tom
Let's not make up facts. The 800 MHz cellular band is in full use in the US, mostly by Verizon Wireless and ATT Mobility, who've bought up most of the A and B block original licensees. The 902-928 MHz band is used by many things besides unlicensed data. (Like 2.4 GHz, its primary use is "ISM" -- industrial heating, motion detectors, and other non-information transmitters.)
Microsoft's original prototype was obviously broken. (It was from Microsoft. What did you expect?) Now they're shipping a Service Pack version to the FCC. Other manufacturers can also build them.
It would be unacceptable for a whitespace device to cause "TVI", but that's really a trivial technical problem. DTV transmitters are spaced far enough apart ot leave lots and lots of room. I think the broadcasters are hoping to get permission some day to convert their broadcast frequencies to some other use, and are trying to forestall conflicts.
Valid within its assumptions
I have worked with KK Ramakrishnan and as traffic and queuing experts go, he's one of the best. The study appears to be valid within its assumptions. And its assumption is that you have loss-sensitive flows an non-loss-sensitive flows, which is quite valid. So two ways to handle this are a) handle them differently, or b) overprovision so that nobody gets loss. Well guess what folks -- answer b requires a lot more capacity! I think this is so obvious that it's amazing that people don't accept it -- they're so hung up on the vague notion of "neutrality" that they start denying any math that seems to go against a very fundamentalist "best effort for everything" view.
The real issue around neutrality is not allowing different applications to request different treatment. The problem is when the *network operator* makes that decision. Some networks are starting to deploy Deep Packet Inspection, essentially wiretapping of the customer payload, to do either/both of deciding on how to handle the packets, and how much to charge. For instance DPI vendors have proposed charging a fee for wireless connections to email servers other than the network operator's, because this competes with high-cost SMS. And ATT has talked about taking a value-based cut out of ecommerce transactions passing over their wires! And imagine censoring the news based on the network operators' preference or kickbacks. "No BBC for you, chump, we got Fox!" This is the type of thing that is entirely legal now. Once Big Ed Whitacre at SBC started blabbing about those plans, the spin doctors recovered by trying to distract the conversation onto video prioritization. That's a distraction.
Different stateside
This is probably evidence of bad pricing practices on the part of UK (and other EU) mobile carriers. Sure, when it was brandy-new technology and every mobile second was precious, they could justify those rates, but nowadays it's just a ripoff, using the terminating monopoly to gouge CPP.
Here in the US, mobile usage is skyrocketing. Most people are on block-of-airtime plans, which often exempt in-network and off-hours calls. Some smaller carriers now provide totally unmetered service, which is popular with young people who don't even have a land line. (Land lines here are also usually unmetered, at least for "local" calls.) The result is that wireless carriers in some markets are generating more minutes of use than the wireline carriers!
I think a lot of the growth in the US is due to the wireless carriers' generally competitive mindset. Most markets have about four carriers, just enough to keep them on their toes. (FCC Chairman K-Mart is trying to get that down to three, so they can become monopolistic too, but fourth place T-Mobile is doggedly fighting on.) Wireline providers are less competitive here. And it sounds as if wireless providers in Europe are more interested in gouging for what minutes they can sell rather than in really competing hard.
Doesn't apply to cable, but may apply to web browsing, email, etc.
The Verizon patents would not apply to cable telephony, as the cable companies do not use the Internet. They use IP encapsulation, but PacketCable handles the calls differently.
IP encapsulation of voice is not at issue. The patents instead cover DNS and ENUM, the translation of names (including phone numbers) to IP addresses. One patent is about having multiple choices, which is what's done with MX records in email.
Now obviously DNS is not novel -- but the judge didn't seem to care about prior art, and neither does the patent office. ENUM's a standard, again probably the patent filing. So the patents are trash. But then so are a lot of patents in the United States. Someone has to take the time and spend the money to get these overturned, of course, and the FUD is what Verizon wants, to use bad patents as a weapon against competition.