Why not both? The database of cell phone towers that shows you which tower you're connected to already exists:
http://opensignal.com/android/

It's more useful for trying to figure out where to go to get the best signal in your environment, but if you can use it to figure out when you're being oppressed, then all the more power to you.

I used gmail as my smarthost when I had Verizon FiOS
Something like:
https://alimanfoo.wordpress.co...

(generate a dedicated gmail password for this instead of using your "main" one)

Ugh. Thanks for making me cry.

My kids have awful Dell netbooks running an absurdly locked-down Windows 7. It takes forever for them to do any of their work online, because they can only use the IE browser to run all these java and javascript -heavy sites (mostly because of the sidebar ads), like http://www.easybib.com/ . Editing their work in their haiku wiki is painful... particularly dealing with images which they're required to use 2-3 per assignment.

The worst part is that they've figured out that even though they can't launch cmd.exe or install real programming languages, they've found they can save and execute .bat files. So yes, they're learning to program .bat *cry*

... and I'll be looking forward to "Nanaimo" after that.

Hopefully they'll still be making bar phones at that time, and put off the transition to some wearable-in-your-face thing until "Pie"

If you're in a hurry to see the performance improvements over the UI improvements, you can go ahead and switch from the Dalvik JIT to the ART precompiled runtime now:
http://www.cultofandroid.com/5...

(you may want to have a charger nearby while recompiling all of your apps, though)

There's only one option where you can't readily find a human to do it for you cheaper/better/faster. The only place with no humans.

it's a false dichotomy anyway... there aren't substantial differences between the way either party runs things.

Our form of representative democracy is not about giving power to the people, and letting citizens run things and make the important decisions. You wouldn't want that anyway, the average citizen is a moron.

Democracy has one simple purpose, and that's to keep the government in charge by preventing a bloody revolution. That's it. A safety valve to appease the angry mob at just the right time interval with political theater. And we've achieved the perfect balance of two mobs, each 49% of the population, who blame the other half for every grievance real or perceived. The pendulum swings very slightly each election cycle. We are there. We have arrived. We are at the center of stability. Yin and Yang in equilibrium. You will never have a more perfect system.

Until the time it collapses from within.

John S. Hall (aka King Missile) It's Saturday:

I want to be different, like everybody else I want to be like
I want to be just like all the different people
I have no further interest in being the same
Because I have seen difference all around
And now I know that that's what I want

I don't want to blend in and be indistinguishable
I want to be a part of the different crowd
And assert my individuality along with the others
Who are different like me

I don't want to be identical to anyone or anything
I don't even want to be identical to myself
I want to look in the mirror and wonder
"Who is that person? I've never seen that person before
I've never seen anyone like that before"

I want to call into question the very idea
That identity can be attached
I want a floating, shifting, ever changing persona
Invisibility and obscurity

Detachment from the ego and all of it's pursuits
Unity is useless
Conformity is competitive and divisive and leads only to
Stagnation and death

Read more: King Missile - It's Saturday Lyrics | MetroLyrics
http://www.metrolyrics.com/its...

If you actually scroll down the page a http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo you'll see it actually has two speakers, a "woofer" and a tweeter.

More interesting is the array of 7 mics. Should be possible to get some good positional audio capture and noise reduction that way.

I picked up an el-cheapo bluetooth speaker/mic a while ago, and it works decently enough. I can see people paying 10x more for a "premium" version of something like http://www.amazon.com/Wireless... I suppose... "Real" speakerphones for conference rooms with good NC and AEC are pretty expensive.

Huh, huh, huh, thank you, drive through.

I mean, thru

yeah, yeah, greenhouse gases like CO2, and to a larger extent methane and water vapor reflect energy attempting to leave the biosphere back to Earth, keeping energy in like a blanket (or insulator), affecting the energy balance. My father-in-law is a mathematician at NASA GSFC, where he works on radiative transfer equations used to tune LIDAR instruments on NASA/NOAA satellites that measure cloud and vegetation cover. What would you like to know?

You can ask me about UNIX too... I did Slackware back when it came on 80 floppies, but I don't talk about that much; at least compared to the time I bootstrapped Debian on a laptop through its parallel port since it didn't have a removable drive or CD or USB.

Mail-in votes are wonderful. But probably too democratic for most.

Ah, yeah... I'm not demonizing the deniers, just admitting that they're likely more rational and politically savvy than environmentalists give them credit for. More scientific studies (and certainly IPCC announcements) are not going to change that no matter how much you rub their faces in it.

So anyone trying to "save the world" by cutting down carbon footprint will just have to do that much better to pick up the slack. Probably even more to make up for all the coal-rollers trolling them.

We have the benefit of watching this play out in Southeast Asia before it's politically expedient to do anything here. Having lived in Bangkok for a few years, the effects of pollution witnessed by average americans here in the US is a joke. We have a loooonng way to fall before we might have to even consider implementing things like China's One Child Policy. But legislation is reactionary, not proactive. No one is really going to do anything or even legislate anything until the shit really hits the fan. Which, even by the most dire global warming projection, isn't going to be that severe even 100 years out. So this is really going to be a blame game to see if they can spread some of the guilt around to people who don't really have a conscience about this sort of thing anyways.

The problem is even with global warming, the shit will never really hit the fan in a way that fault can be directly tied back to the polluters, and even if it was, good luck getting them to pay for the damages. Higher pollution will erode our health slightly. Sure lots of low-lying population centers will be wiped out, but those events will occur after hurricanes or tsunamis, and migrating the refugees will be part of some humanitarian rescue operation. I bet that even around that time, there will be more government intervention passed to stop the influx of refugees migrating to higher ground than there will be for government intervention to limit pollution.

I agree! Politics is just administrative overhead that should be minimized in both time and expense. My electricity comes primarily from hydro and wind, and I take public transit to work. What were we arguing about again?

Yes, yes, you're smart. We get it. Just substitute your nitpick with "Burning Things Bad". Sheesh.

FWIW, my original post included "Heat and Pollution". The "Pollution" bit that you omitted from your quote should more than cover the greenhouse gas effects, as well as the aerosols that reflect energy back to space and counteract global warming to some degree. Isn't it great how pollution causes both global warming and global dimming? And kinda ironic how our thirst for energy is so high that the stored sunlight we burn from the past also diminishes the amount of energy we receive for the future?

Heat is an issue as well. Urban "heat islands" are well documented in scientific literature. Sure, they're caused just as much by the sun warming up hot pavement as ICE emissions, but they've been demonstrated to change the micro-climates of cities. As you know, heat rises, pulling in denser, cooler air from elsewhere. And then you get all these people wondering why anthropogenic global warming is happening since it's been colder than usual.