Since 2001, the bands used by cell phones have changed and the power requirements of the antennae have changed as well. Due to more concurrent users, you need more cell towers to re-use the frequencies, with the added benefit of a shorter transmission distance and less power required on the cell phone itself to do that transmission. In 2001, cell phones still had the analog bands that stretched city-wide.

You are a conspiracy nut.

Set up some system to provide the call data, provide the relatively low cost infastructure to do it, and you're rolling in $10m/year?

Companies don't make money with billion dollar checks, its incremental. If their infastructure and support for this is $2m/year and you have to staff 8 people for it, that's still a massive profit margin.

In theory, yes. But in practice, they tend to strangle the industry once they grow to an industry-wide monopoly. It becomes about bravado and 'getting more' because that's how the union leaders stay in power, so it creates a field of political waste. As an industry, it no longer becomes a race to progress and competing with your rivals, but who can slash costs enough to stay afloat when crushed with huge union costs. Yes, all the companies in the industry experience these, but it actually serves to cripple and centralize the industry, the exact opposite of what a union should theoretically do.

Problem with this logic is that power consumption is a factor. While the chips are underclocked, they are also undervolted by a proportional amount. Undervolting with underclocking was a rare pasttime by overclockers, some done as hobby and others done in a quest for performance/watt crown. The chips binned for the highest clocks and the chips that overclock the best run at higher clocks on the same voltage, or more efficient. The same chips can be undervolted and perform the highest clock at their lower respective voltage. Since the low power chips are sold on battery life, you can't just take an inefficient processor and undervolt it and call it a day.

Its a pervasive problem in Canada, primarily with specialists, even in populated areas. My girlfriend had to wait 6 months for a gastroscopy, is 3 months into a wait for a PH test, and about 4 months out from surgery for badly progressed Barret's syndrome.

Canadian healthcare works fine for basic checkups and doctor visits, but fails miserably when it comes to spcialists. Finland, highly lauded as one of the best socialized healthcare systems as well, suffers the same problem: my Aunt died during the waiting period from Breast Cancer because of the nonsense, and had previously lost the 'doctor lottery' which is a way to describe how you get screwed if the doctor you're assigned to there is terrible. This is what the 'death panel' talk is really about, insane waiting lists that kill needing patients because they didn't get priority.

The problem with US healthcare costs is mostly related to emergency care and major procedures, which tends to have problems in every socialized medicine implementation in the world as well. Yeah, I think costs could come down as well as basic preventive medicine be more practiced by standardizing basic visits and screenings, which hopefully the ACA will help with. However, I'm against making the other half of the pie public. There's a reason there's tons of doctors offices on the US side of the Canadian border...they scoot over the border to get immediate care needs and specialist services.

At the same time, this is the downfall.

If you attempt to make a scientifically accurate depiction, you're dabbling in pseudorealism, not science fiction. When you go that far, and work off of historical realistic depictions of real world things like the space shuttle, hubble, and the space station, you better get the facts right.

What makes this type of movie enjoyable is the possibility of the improbable, not the impossibility of sci fi.

And in some cases, arrested because someone is illegally abusing the legal system. For example, a revenge lawsuit after a breakup for stalking, fabricated by the mother and daughter. It didn't happen to me, but I've seen it happen. The mother has a history of abusing the legal system and is doing it for her daughter. Regardless of it getting dismissed as nonsense, the mug shot is plastered everywhere and the first google of the guy it happened to is about an arrest.

SteamOS has a unique problem that no other ecosystem has to deal with: In order to leverage steam's strength, the size of the community, they had to do two things. First, ensure that the catalog of games is playable on the TV, and second, that this userbase can interact with the steam community on PCs. If the system can't do this, it requires a huuuge shift of users in order to make it successful, which requires the kind of investment microsoft did with the XBox.

The second bullet point above leads to an interesting problem if they go down the path of interoperability with PC clients: controllers and mice. PCs have several genres that are unplayable with a controller, and the mouse and keyboard combo offers a significant advantage in almost every kind of competitive gaming and multiplayer. I hope that their controller bridges the gap, and chances are it might.

The touchpad-based movement is a huge change from a joystick. Precision movement on a touch-style pad like that is the only way a controller could handle snap turns and accuracy that muscle movement on a mouse pad offers. The way its set up, I'd expect it to work sort of like the Thinkpad nib. If it works and people adopt it, it will allow people to play things like RTSes, turn-based games like Civ, and a host of other options. Yeah, hotkeys are another important point, but one more easily overcome than the massive gulf that currently exists between the mouse and the analog joystick.

There are other factors that will tie to its success, but I think the future of the system ties to its interoperability with the PC gamers. If it doesn't, its just going to be an also-ran.

Just some info, early adopters of blu-ray who went with Samsung got screwed. They pulled a Sony and the software updates required to play newer BD-movies removed the functionality to play DVDs. Why? I think because they skimped on the memory.

Of course they didnt' compensate or replace all 3 I bought (Mom, Brother, Me). I was rightly pissed off and haven't bought a Samsung product since.

This has nothing to do with labor costs, and everything to do with idle costs. In the port industry, berth productivity is king. If we can reduce the idle time of a ship by 6 hours, it can save the carrier millions on that trade route through route optimization taking a ship out of the loop or via fuel efficiency on slower speeds.

I think we don't see how much damage these things can do to society in a long-term look at things. I think the best case study to look at would be China in the late 19th century, where the opioids grown in India were cheap and accessible in the country spurring a 10% addiction rate in the population. It caused very serious societal problems which eventually lead to a major clean-up phase involving the ban and blocking of imports.

People arguing cheap and available are superimposing their rationality on addicts. Addicts, regardless of cost, will destroy every aspect of their life for more. This can be seen with fairly cheap alcohol, fathers spending their kids college savings and opening joint credit accounts with their family to steal their credit and burden them for life with their parent's debt, running up payday loans and not paying the mortgage, and so on. I've seen this first hand.

I agree certain drugs shouldn't be treated this way like pot, but opioids are not one of them.

A lot of left turns in my town use sensors on the ground with a lower limit of 5 seconds. The sensors will turn the light yellow if it doesn't detect a car in 3 seconds. There is one big left turn near my house that I use to go to the grocery store that always has around 10-20 cars in it at any time before 8 PM, and its a 30 second left turn light that will only last 5 seconds with one car. The full cycle for the intersection is about 3 minutes. One person not accelerating and turning causes cars to back up onto the main road until the next transition. It is a common problem with lackidaiscal god-window-sticker soccer mom drivers not hitting the damn gas pedal, and the more recently added majority infringers, dipshits looking at their phones.

Causing traffic congestion because you can't wait 10 minutes to read and type out a text is unnaceptable.

I can confirm this happens even on dual-monitor setups with the default driver. It is extremely common when playing a full screen game on one monitor and leaving the other up for your background stuff, even with the cursor stuck to the gaming monitor. This happens to me when playing Dota 2.

It is common to the point where there's threads about it spattered around the internet.

Even if what you said was true, you assume that the reward outweighs the risk. You are flat out wrong. Intent matters. In our industry, we get a serious investigation from OSHA even if a union worker dies of a heart attack, or if someone ran a stop sign and caused an accident at the facility. We do everything we can to make it safe, even as far as changing traffic patterns, and it is the number one commitment in my company. See, the fines START at the massive numbers and are reduced if you can prove that it was not willful negligence. Basically, you ahve to have policies in place that control against bad behavior in a reasonable manner or you have no oomph to your requests to reduce fines when accidents occur. It is more expensive to hide than it is to implement properly, and even if you are focusing solely on the money, it is more expensive to anyone worth their salt who can map out all the real costs associated with bad behavior.

The companies that can't look beyond step 2 are the ones that fail. Safety pays, as does reducing emissions and power consumption.