It works, but it's not as accurate as one might think. Signals bounce, which (at least in the GPS world) is known as multipath. This both result in a longer distance (and delay) and a weakened signal. The recipient (the antenna tower) do not know how much the signal has bounced.

Actually the distortion and reflection in the GPS signal makes it possible to gather (crude) information about the location and shape surrounding buildings. I wish I could find the appropiate video :-/

The Sphinx: To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn.

The Sphinx: He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.

The Sphinx: When you care what is outside, what is inside cares for you.

Mr. Furious: Okay, am I the only one who finds these sayings just a little bit formulaic? "If you want to push something down, you have to pull it up. If you want to go left, you have to go right." It's...
The Sphinx: Your temper is very quick, my friend. But until you learn to master your rage...
Mr. Furious: ...your rage will become your master? That's what you were going to say. Right? Right?
The Sphinx: Not necessarily.

In that case we could assume that Hitler... ... damn, Godwin. Walked right into that one!

User from Denmark ( EU) here.

I admire the amout of (deliberately) open wifi hotspots in USA. A couple of friends traveled around the States last year and found free wifi services everywhere - except Las Vegas.

This seem to be an interesting phenomenon. At first it might seem reasonable: wherever you are expected to pay for services you are also expected to pay for Internet access.

However, this leads to some curious cases. I have experienced hotels in Denmark, England and Spain that charge for internet access. But on the other hand it is not uncommon for hostels (that are cheaper and where one would expect a lesser degree of service) to have free wifi.

The economic background is interesting. The cost of putting up a hotspot is pretty low, especially at simple hostels that probably already have internet access and wifi for the employees. But the expenses of putting up a payment solution and handling support is high.

This leads to an interesting paradox: It is the payment solution that might not be feasible at "cheap" places such as hostels; not the Internet connection by itself. The result is that since it is not worthwhile putting up a payment solution the Internet access is simply free!

In some places this leads to even more interesting results:

The suburban railway service in Copenhagen has free wifi on the the trains. These trips are usually short, hence the payment process might itself take too long to be convenient.

However the inter-city trains where travel times are usually about 1½-4 hours there is a wifi payment solution. At first it might make sense but as it is charged per minute any delays underway would lead to a larger travel time and therefore a higher total cost.

Free Internet access could partially make up for a bad travel experience with delays (one would be able to still work online, pass time by casual surf, chat and so on or update successive travel arrangements). Instead passengers are simply punished further economically when the travel is delayed underway.

Besides all the other posts, this might just be a small improvement in rare cases:

The V8 javascript engine does some clever work when performing regular expression matching. Normal engines would compare one character at a time, but whenever the possibility occurs V8 matches several characters at once (eg. for /foobar/ it will try fo match "foob" instead of just first "f", then "o", then "o"), doing comparison on longer segments than just (usually) 8 bits at a time. This usually means that comparisons are grouped together as 32 bit values matching several characters at once.

I reckon the 64-bit edition would simply match up to 64 bits as well.

There are a lot of exceptions where the engine can't just simply match long segments (unicode, case-insensitive searches and so on) and there surely are operations that are a lot more cpu intensive than just comparing strings. I'm just excited about that simple optimization :)

.. but I didn't speak up because I wasn't Soylent Green. .. but I didn't speak up because I wasn't Charlie Brown. .. but I didn't speak up because I wasn't Technician Ted. .. but I didn't speak up because I wasn't Striker, Ted.

The end of level monster is pretty hard.

Well, if there isn't a law against this, there should be!

Caveat: These reports origin from foreign dubious sources and haven't been processed by the US News un-bias-o-matic.

I look forward to reading /. in fifteen years.

"Windows FOX is bloated. Why does it require 2 TB of ram just to boot when I can browse the intercloud without problems on Gnubun*x running with only 512 GB ram?"

It's people like you (and your fish) who created the economic crisis in the first place!