Actually, the speed is very much an issue. Most traditional CDMA/3G phones cannot service objects moving at high speeds (more than 128 Kmph) because their receivers cannot keep track; read up on finger tracking on rake receivers. A call may last for a few seconds (if that) before getting dropped. I understand a few cell towers designed in the past few years can support high speeds, but they are mostly deployed in Japan and are not in common use. 2G systems will almost surely not be able to support high speeds.

The other issue is handoff, a particular tower serves a relatively small area (maybe a few km in urban areas). Assuming a 10 kilometer cell diameter, a plane traveling at 500 Mph would be switching between cells at a rate of one switch every 45 seconds. [10/ (500*1.6) ) * 3600. ] Now it is theoretically possible for CDMA & 3G systems to support this rate, but it is somewhat hard to imagine such handoffs happening reliably while the plane is moving so fast.

I've worked in the cellular industry and I'm still not sure of how the calls from the 9/11 planes worked. In fact, many of the 9/11 truthers point to this inconsistency as support of their claims that the calls never happened :)

CDMA is not analog.

And I'm confused about some of your other comments... AFAIK there are many products (expensive, mind you) that can listen in on cellular frequencies, whether analog or digital. These are used in cell phone/base station design all the time.

Cisco is no longer a `high tech’ company by any stretch of imagination. The bulk of the technical work that is being done there is incremental and low-value-add, and can easily be done by the sort of easily-led newbies that such companies are eager to hire in the third world. They need very few experts. In the meantime, companies running datacenters are beginning to realize that they do not need the full-fledged switches, routers and other gear that comply to ten thousand IEEE standards. Google et-al are sourcing the hardware cheaply from china and having their own folks write just the bare minimum of networking code required to get stuff working in their datacenters. They are un-willing to pay Cisco premiums. Cisco has managed to bribe enough politicians and spread enough FUD to keep Huawei out of the US. But such tactics do not work too well outside the US, those markets figure that if someone is spying on them anyway, it might as well be the cheaper vendor.

Consequently, over the past 5 years, all semblance of commercial value has been driven out of the networking industry in the west. There are hardly any networking/telecommunication companies left. The infrastructure divisions of Lucent, Nortel, Motorola, Nokia & Siemens have either disappeared completely or exist only in vestigial forms. Folks who populated the networking industry in the late nineties and early 2000s have flocked to the surviving companies, wiz, Cisco & Juniper. Most (but definitely not all) of the smart folks sensed the oncoming demise of the networking industry and got out of Dodge while the getting was good. This means that old-school companies like Cisco and Juniper are stuffed full of people who are unemployable anywhere else. Their skills are too specialized and not transferable to any of the emerging software fields, or simply not of value in such companies. (What good does an intimate knowledge of zero-copy technologies to a company that considers hardware a commodity and writes all their stuff in Java, resulting in hundreds of copies under the hood?) They have not really kept in touch with the basics of computer science and are mostly unable to make it through the interview processes of growing web-based companies.

Thus, as other posters have indicated, there is a large volume of deadwood at Cisco. The first concern of most of such folks is to avoid being caught in the next layoff. Everyone realizes that Cisco is slowly and systematically shedding heads in the US, Europe & other high head-count countries and growing in India, a-la IBM. The politics at Cisco will make that in the US congress seem like that of a preschool. It is commonly heard within Cisco that the entire caste system of India has been replicated there. Cisco has not developed anything innovative in-house for more than a decade. Pretty much all their new product introductions have been acquisitions. No wonder John Chambers sees no value in in-house talent.

I do not intend to suggest that everyone in Cisco is sub-par. I personally know some excellent A+ engineers who are still hanging on there for various (valid and questionable) reasons, and I wish them all the best, and hope they manage to find other employment before the axe reaches their own necks.

Remember this the next time some artistic type is trying to argue that their work is somehow `creative', as opposed to the mindless, artisan endeavors of engineers, computer scientists, burger flippers etc...

They respect him, of course. They may even admire him or even worship him. But how many people who have to interact with him personally actually like him?

Does he behave this way to his family? The arguments he makes offer no distinctions between technical stupidity and any other kind. Does he abuse his wife/children because they don't come up to his standards of smartness? I am guessing not. If so, then he is being a hypocrite by abusing his professional acquaintances, who doubtless feel compelled to put up with his rude behavior because of the aforementioned admiration/respect.

There is a `white' elephant in the room as far as Silicon Valley is concerned. Whites are a minority in most areas. Most of the decent schools are overwhelmingly Asian and the school cultures have transformed to reflect this fact. The over-whelming focus is on academics to the detriment of extra-curricular activities like sports or art. This does not affect a twenty-something who has moved over from some other part of the country; he is too busy enjoying the fantastic weather and rubbing shoulders with the tech elite. It does matter to a 40-something whose two kids are the only whites in their class. Even if he does not care, his partner may not see it the same way.

There are already areas of the bay area that whites people avoid if they can help it... Sunnyvale, Fremont, Milpitas, most of San Jose, Santa Clara, Cupertino.

I'm neither defending nor criticizing these attitudes or considerations. Just pointing out that they exist.

Hi,

I'm a great fan of KDE 3.x also. For what it is worth, I find that KDE4.9+ to be as stable as 3.x ever was, and as feature-full... as a DESKTOP.

I also switched away from KDE 4 to gnome in the early days of KDE4, and was rather reluctantly forced away from Gnome by the recent modifications. I tried KDE4.9 that was packaged as part of Fedora 18, and was very pleasantly surprised. KDE has recovered. It is VERY configurable, supports the usual windows paradigms that we're used to and is very very stable.

HOWEVER, the KDE apps are a different story. They are still half-complete, buggy and lose data. Even basic apps that I use regularly are fairly primitive. For example, KDE has a number of image viewers (Gwenview, Kuickshow...) but none of them can hold a candle to the power, elegance and simplicity of an 8-year old GQview or its modern cousin Geeqie. I tried the mail app on an experimental basis and was rewarded by prompt crashes and data corruptions. There is nothing even close to Gimp, Pan or other staples of Gnome.

So I find myself in the weird position of running the KDE desktop, but using mostly gnome apps.

I heard that there is a bug in the 3g subsystem that prevents the phone from connecting to the towers, so it keeps retrying and wasting the battery. So it only affects 3G operators like AT&T, won't affect folks on Verizon.

Maybe the organic matter would `seed' life on Mars a-la Prometheus.

You are absolutely right. Old people are in general desperately lonely, and they often suppress `warning messages' for the company when being conned by a smart personable young person (or a cheerful voice at the end of the phone line).

The problem is really social isolation.

The father of one of my closest friends (in his 80s) was conned into investing close to $250,000.00 into a real estate venture in Latin America. He is not someone who comes across as a doddering old man. He is still alert, reasonably physically fit (for his age) and shows no signs of dementia. He had a successful career in business and survived all the vicious corporate politics of the huge corporation that he worked for, and retired with a healthy retirement account.

But pretty much everyone he knows is either dead or lives too far away for regular contact. His children live across the country and his spouse is no more. He has almost no living friends. Pretty much everyone whom he knew before he was 30 have passed on. The elderly do not make new friends very easily with their own age group. He goes for weeks without talking to a single soul (think of the guy from the movie `Up', that scenario is quite accurate). He is isolated, lonely, disenfranchised and desperate to feel relevant to society.

He was ripe for the picking by the smart young woman who knocked on his door in a business suit, heels and with a briefcase full of glossy brochures.

This is just part of life and how nature has programmed us. For better or for worse, women are the once who define the social rules of life. And this has always been the case. The root cause of this is that women are far more valuable to `the tribe' than men are, and society is reflexively programmed to protect the feminine interest. Trying to criticize this dynamic through a logical perspective is quite counter-productive. It is almost impossible for a man to criticize a woman, or indeed any aspect of female culture without looking like a whiny crybaby or a clueless idiot. A better thing would be to accept this and either move on or find ways to use this to your advantage.

A few other asymmetries to add to the list:
1. Porn for men is heavily regulated and looked down upon. It is almost impossible for a man to be known as a consumer of porn and still maintain a decent social standing. However, you can buy women's pornography at Walmart, and female judges openly discuss reading `50 shades of grey'.

2. A woman who uses her sexuality/command of the language etc to intimidate, manipulate or verbally castrate men is generally admired in the US culture. A man who shouts at a woman attains immediate jerkhood.

3. Most woman in a committed relationship use sex (or the withholding thereof) as a powerful tool to control the men in their life. How many times have you heard the phrase `he is going to sleep on the couch tonight?' This is generally considered an admirable thing in our culture.

4. Research indicates that women `stray' as much as men outside relationships. About 20% of men who think the are the fathers of their own kids are mistaken. However, it is men that are penalized by society and the legal system for failing to keep it in their pants.

The list goes on. Noone will be able to change any of this, unless you move to Islamic-style societies.

Not correct. The Tamil Tigers and various other groups have used women suicide bombers. Rajiv Gandhi, the ex-Prime Minister of India was killed by female suicide bomber.

The Indian Christian Church (at least some of them) have a history of doing stuff like this; the aggressive conversion tactics they have adopted will put most US fundamentalist churches to shame. During a trip out there a few years ago, I witnessed a priest perform a "your Hindu god is false" demonstration in public field, accompanied by (I kid you not) an orchestra, with the entire performance amplified by huge speakers placed all around. The priest was dressed in robes reminiscent of a medieval Pope, and threw a Hindu Idol and a Cross into a big glass tank of water. The Hindu Idol sank, and the cross floated, and the guy exclaimed that this showed that the Hindu god was a false god. It was obvious that the idol was made of stone and the cross of wood. There was a huge crowd standing by, many of them ooh'd and aah'd. It looked like at least some of the ooh'ers were part of the performance. I went up to the priest and challenged him, and he started yelling at me. Some of his acolytes grabbed me and basically pushed me away from the place. I think I would surely have been beaten up if I had not been a foreigner.

I learned later that this sort of stuff is quite common in India. The church has started Christian ceremonies during mainstream Indian festivals like Diwali etc, during which time theys hold huge, extravagant masses to celebrate supposedly Christian events. If you are a student of history and want to know how "Christmas" ultimately ended up in December, this would be an object lesson.

The thing that amazed me was how tolerant the crowds were. Here was a guy who was yelling insults about the mainstream religion in a public place, and a vast crown just watched and let him have his say in peace. I doubt if this would happen in the US, let alone in any predominantly Islamic place.

Banning porn/hookers is basically pandering to women. Much of Woman's social influence and power derives from the sexual hold She has on Man. Pornography and hookers directly threaten that hold.

This is not very different from the govt trying to get the ACTA through to satisfy the movie industry.