This is a question I've wondered for years and have never seen answered: why can't chemical thrusters used on satellites (particularly in geostationary orbit) be replaced with ion ones? It seems to me that running out of fuel is the primary method of "death" for a geostationary satellite. Do station-keeping maneuvers really require that much thrust?

That isn't a fix, but merely flimsy cork or finger in the hole. Unfortunately, from what I read (Samsung's version of /dev/mem but with global access), this "hole" is more proverbially along the lines of this bad boy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingham_Canyon_Mine

In other words, its a hardware design flaw so big it can only be worked around, and even then only poorly.

I'm doubly pissed here because I bought the T-Mobile USA version of the Galaxy Note II (SGH-T889) on the day it came out, and a month before this broke. Luckily, I make a point of not doing financial transactions on it, but what about the other 5M+ GN2 owners as well as international GS3 owners (CAN/AM GS3 uses Snapdragon and is supposedly unaffected...).

I stand corrected!

Sorry, but things haven't been that way for years here in the US; it may be that way still in (parts of?) Canada and Mexico. Here, the old Class-D stations are required to lower power enough to prevent interference (in some cases to ridiculous values like *TENS* of watts!), but not go off the air completely. Likewise, FM and TV stations are not allowed to go off the air without a good reason.

I don't remember exactly when this was done, but I'm pretty sure it was in the 90's.

There are two problems here:

1a. You haven't specified exactly what you'll be doing: if it's just office crap, anything will do; but if you'll be running the GIMP, games, etc, you'll need higher-end hardware (both CPU and GPU).

1b. Do you need x86/x64? If not, a Chromebook or tablet with USB-OTG and hub may be an answer; unfortunately, the below blob problem still applies.

2. For GPUs there are two kinds of drivers: reverse-engineered and proprietary blobs; you almost certainly know this. NVIDIA is the king of the blob department, AMD/ATI is middle of the road, and Intel (along with older stuff like SiS) is mostly completely reverse-engineered or even released open. Bear in mind, the open drivers are messy: based on the state of the art, graphics is by far the most difficult thing to reverse engineer a driver for, and I really feel for the guys working on them! (Edit: AMD/ATI's blobs are well known for being a mess, too!)

Bottom line: if RMS can barely get a machine to his liking, you'll have only a marginally less difficult time. Sorry.

Not one of you seems to have caught the "baking for several hours at 250C has the same effect" part, so big question: could I bake my SSD at 250C (482F for us Americaners, and easily attainable in any kitchen oven) to restore it once I exceed the flash's write limit? Or will the caps pop, die packages (or even the PCB and its traces!) de-laminate, etc?

Thanksgiving (and now Christmas) turkey fresh from the oven along with a freshened SSD sounds especially delicious!

Maybe it was just buried, but its hard to believe not ONE of you remembered Stallman's comments on Amazon:

http://stallman.org/amazon.html

The games lineup is a strong one, with games such as New Super Mario Bros U, Arkham City Armoured Edition, Assassins Creed 3, Call of Duty Black Ops 2, Sonic AllStars Racing, Nintendo Land, Tank Tank Tank, ScribbleNauts Unlimited, Epic Mickey 2 The Power of Two, ESPN Sports Connection, DarkSiders 2, Rabbids Land, Mass Effect 3, Ninja Gaiden 3 Razors Edge, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, Wipeout 3 and Just Dance 4 all available on launch day.

What, no Hero's Duty, Sugar Rush Speedway, or Fix-It Felix, Jr?

I just bought a Galaxy Note 2 last week; now that the Nexus 4 is released, it has made me really question whether I should return the GN2 for the N4. There are a few reasons I decided against it:

1. I *LOVE*LOVE*LOVE* the 5.5" true RGB AMOLED screen! Sure at least one person here is whining 4.7" is too big, but the GN2 fits in my pocket fine, though holding it one-handed can be tough without a case (it's slippery like most modern phones). In any case, this is the #1 reason I bought it and I think I'll have a hard time buying something smaller in the future.

2. All (recent?) Nexus devices have no SD? What's up with that? I agree with everyone else, this is sort of a deal-breaker, and the main reason I never bought the Galaxy Nexus. I do *NOT* want to have to store my crap in the cloud.

3. Not really Nexus, but vs LG, HTC, etc, no removable battery is a total deal-breaker PERIOD.

4. GN2 has 4 cores and LTE built-in, even on the T-Mobile USA version (which future-proofs it from a network standpoint); only the "international" (unbranded) version is lacking it. That said, unless you're tethering, I don't think HSPA+ 21Mbps is going to be that bad unless you're in a fringe area, which LTE handles much better, supposedly (and LTE-Advanced should do better still). Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, and "international" GN2 all have pentaband radios as well, meaning they should support GSM and HSPA+ on every band in the world except 12cm (2600 MHz used for Sprint/Clearwire here in the USA, also Telstra down under according to Wikipedia) and 700 MHz (Verizon and AT&T in USA, but they're only putting LTE there so it doesn't matter).

Now, the one iffy part is Nexus is, by definition, open--what the whole article is about--and the GN2 is not. Being Samsung, rooting should be easy on the GN2, and with Exynos open sourced (still a bit in shock over that, but not as much as Broadcom and the Raspberry-Pi's chip!), hopefully CyanogenMod will be available soon, though I'll probably wait until the warranty goes first.

One last thing: I'm coming from my N900 and I'm still not sure I'll be selling it. I've read numerous times that Android appears clunky compared to Maemo (which is Debian-based), though Jelly Bean is better: after playing for a while, I agree, but it's certainly not horrible unless you're a dev, I suppose. My main worry with Android is security: that you can't revoke app permissions in stock Android and you pretty much have to root. It's not a huge problem for me because I don't trust carrying around Google Wallet and NFC along with lots of personal stuff without much better security, but it's painfully clear that they want to track you: I mean, the Accuweather widgit on the main window won't even update unless you turn tracking on!

I know this is overly-long, but hope it helps someone.

Mike

Did the XBMC guys drop a bunch of platforms?

Also just noticed that their competitor www.mythtv.org is about to have a release early next month as well.

It IS possible, and it's called Iridium. The catch is that it's low bandwidth. But the antarctic bases (as well as plenty of arctic users) are Iridium's bread and butter, particularly among civilian users.

I don't have them in front of me, but I remember there being patents on this very thing going back quite a few years--some back to the 80's! I also think there was a /. article on it somewhere along the line...

The Times article has a good example: a phone-controlled bomb or similar device. There's also a more general human C&C such as the Mumbai terrorist attack, which is apparently why satellite phones are banned in India now.

OTOH, the BART fiasco was a knee-jerk reaction so typical these days and that seems to be what prompted the FCC to do this. It is also clearly NOT an "imminent threat".

Here's the problem I see: there is a very clear ban against jammers in the USA, yet you see US manufacturers all over the place online who supposedly can't sell to you or I, yet have no problem selling to Syria et al. AFAIK, jammers are only "legal" for the miltary to have in the USA, so what was BART/SFPD/etc doing with them in their possession in the first place? (IANAL)

That is half the problem, I think: the other half is the prices, as explained TFA.

Gouging customers is something that's in AT&T's (and all other monopoly's) blood and they continue to do it to this day--it's just most of the gouging is in the details (a little fee here, a little fee there)...