sklnd

ESN is equivalent to IMEI in GSM/UMTS networks. IMEI is tied to equipment, and never changes, just like ESN.

CDMA networks use IMSI to identify subscribers (as opposed to the equipment serial number) just like GSM/UMTS. IMSIs are provisioned on to the phone by the carrier with special software supplied by the phone manufacturer, instead of being supplied to the phone by the phone asking the SIM for it.

There's no technical reason why CDMA networks can't use a removable card to store subscriber data, and indeed there are a few standards for doing so (RUIM and CSIM) and a few carriers that use them.

> There's no technical reason why CDMA networks couldn't have supported SIM cards in their phones, but it was just never done.

Indeed. RUIMs (and CSIMs) were standardized for CDMA, but carriers in the americas never bothered with them. A fair number of asian countries have CDMA carriers that use the, though.

That's a bit of a simplification. Because VoLTE is still being standardized, phones must keep multiple modems active and multiple receive portions of the transceiver ASIC powered on in order to be able to receive voice calls when on LTE. This can be mitigated some on UMTS, because I believe a LTE device can get paged over to WCDMA when a voice call comes in through CSFB, but that cannot be done with the current deployment in traditionally CDMA networks. There was a proposed standard for CSFB to CDMA 1x voice, but I don't think it was adopted by any of the carriers due to some concern with call setup delays and delays to being able to deploy LTE.

Aside from that, you're perfectly right about how power-hungry the current LTE implementations are, because they're early implementations. They will get better as time goes on, within reason.

Do you have particular insight into disease caused by non-ionizing radiation that the rest of the world is missing? I've seen no study that has been able to conclusively link non-ionizing radiation to human health problems, or really any other effect beyond a slight warming of tissue.

Without hard proof of such an effect from radio transmissions, your post falls into the bucket of baseless scaremongering. Behavior like this only results in impeding technological progress.

The key to taxes in the United States is that they are broken up into a large number of categories. 20% sounds about right for "Federal Income Tax", but that's only counting the largest tax of 4 or 5 taxes levied directly on salary.

At that income level (around 100k/yr), the tax federal taxes reported to you on your last pay stub of the year should be around 28%, when you count FICA (6.2%) and Medicare (1.45%). Add to that whatever your state income tax is (most states have an income tax). As an example, I have to pay 4.63% to the state of Colorado. I think most states that impose an income tax are within a few percent of that. Then add the hidden employer side of payroll tax (another 6.2%), and you end up with a figure that is close to 40% of income.

Minimum standard deduction and a single personal exemption will remove a few percent from this figure at filing time, and you can delay tax payment through 401(k) contribution, but it is still a very heavy tax rate. It is just well hidden from the average income earner by putting the taxes into a number of buckets.

I planned for such a thing, as I intended to drive through that area during my holiday travel to see family. I ended up taking a different route because most roads in New Mexico were closed, but I still brought an ample supply of water, a couple days worth of food, a snow shovel, a zero degree sleeping bag, and I had my cell phone reporting my location every minute or so when I had cell service. I also drove a very capable 4x4 vehicle, but that's a more difficult detail to change just for a winter trip. :)

All of that planning is a good idea, but better than that would be to monitor the weather and road conditions closely, and stay home if it looks bad. NMDOT and CDOT publish state road conditions on easy to use sites like nmroads.com and cotrip.org. They're absolutely necessary information for travel in this area during winter. If there's a blizzard warning posted for the area (and there was), its a VERY BAD IDEA to try to travel in remote areas like north eastern New Mexico. The distance between towns is quite large, and that area is pretty prone to blowing snow.

It also completely ignores earlier distributed source control projects like GNU Arch. 2005 was when there was an open source distributed VCS that was fast and pleasant to use, but implementations of the idea are older than that.

At least as far as CDMA and WCDMA go, control signalling is shared for all mobiles camped on a cell. In CDMA, while a mobile is just camping there's not a lot of traffic going between the cell and the mobile on the access and reverse access channel. The mobile registers as per the registration settings, and the idles its radio until it is paged by the cell, it originates a call, or the registration settings require it to register again. When idle, there is no signalling going back and forth on the access channel, so that bandwidth can be allocated for other things.

I'm not at all familiar with GSM, so I can't say how it works. I expect it's similar, though.

> The one issue with T-Mobile is it uses the fairly nonstandard 1870 MHz frequency. I don't know of any other carrier that does (anywhere).

I think you mean GSM/UMTS band II (PCS), as 1870 is in the uplink portion of PCS (1850–1910MHz). That's a pretty standard frequency in North America. All four major US carriers (ATT, T-Mo, Verizon, and Sprint) operate in it (CDMA band class 1 overlaps with UMTS band II), as well as Bell and Telus in Canada, and Telcel in Mexico.

The only somewhat-oddball spectrum T-Mobile has is AWS, which they use for UMTS service. Even then, that's still a standard band according to the ITU.