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#21
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Can cell phones and SPS share the same frequency?
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#22
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Can cell phones and SPS share the same frequency?
In article , Henry Spencer wrote:
In article , Derek Lyons wrote: Heh. One of the things I can't help but be amused by is encountering novels, generally sf from the 1970s, where the entire plot manages to be invalidated by no-one predicting any kind of mobile phone. The mobile phone, cheap personal computing, easy acess to information (the 'net)... SF in general missed some biggies. SF didn't miss them... exactly. You can find speculations about such things in some stories. But you don't find their effects considered carefully in largely-unrelated stories, not consistently anyway. Flying-Car syndrome, no? Everyone thinks of the big ideas every time, no-one thinks of the little ideas every time. ObSpace: all those 1950s proposals talking about space as Somewhere To Go Through, and almost everyone mentioning military uses. But the ideas for SAR-assistance satellites, say, or earth-resources stuff, only cropped up here and there. (AIUI, anyway) You don't have to go back to the 70s to find this, either. The plot of Connie Willis's "Doomsday Book", which is only about a decade old, hits significant problems if you introduce cellphones. Must be one of the latest cases, that; they were surely becoming solid in popular culture by the mid-nineties, even if they were still Something Expensive. [checks] Hmm; 1992... 11m cellphones in the US. Okay, so I was maybe thinking it was a few years later. But even so... Besides, adding cellphones would, if memory serves, have limited people's ability to Fail To Communicate. It's not a *proper* Willis novel if people don't Fail To Communicate ;-) [For those who have not heard of the author in question, you're missing a good thing. http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/firewatch.htm ] -- -Andrew Gray |
#23
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Can cell phones and SPS share the same frequency?
In article , Henry Spencer wrote:
In article , Derek Lyons wrote: Heh. One of the things I can't help but be amused by is encountering novels, generally sf from the 1970s, where the entire plot manages to be invalidated by no-one predicting any kind of mobile phone. The mobile phone, cheap personal computing, easy acess to information (the 'net)... SF in general missed some biggies. SF didn't miss them... exactly. You can find speculations about such things in some stories. But you don't find their effects considered carefully in largely-unrelated stories, not consistently anyway. Flying-Car syndrome, no? Everyone thinks of the big ideas every time, no-one thinks of the little ideas every time. ObSpace: all those 1950s proposals talking about space as Somewhere To Go Through, and almost everyone mentioning military uses. But the ideas for SAR-assistance satellites, say, or earth-resources stuff, only cropped up here and there. (AIUI, anyway) You don't have to go back to the 70s to find this, either. The plot of Connie Willis's "Doomsday Book", which is only about a decade old, hits significant problems if you introduce cellphones. Must be one of the latest cases, that; they were surely becoming solid in popular culture by the mid-nineties, even if they were still Something Expensive. [checks] Hmm; 1992... 11m cellphones in the US. Okay, so I was maybe thinking it was a few years later. But even so... Besides, adding cellphones would, if memory serves, have limited people's ability to Fail To Communicate. It's not a *proper* Willis novel if people don't Fail To Communicate ;-) [For those who have not heard of the author in question, you're missing a good thing. http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/firewatch.htm ] -- -Andrew Gray |
#24
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Can cell phones and SPS share the same frequency?
In article ,
Andrew Gray wrote: You don't have to go back to the 70s to find this, either. The plot of Connie Willis's "Doomsday Book", which is only about a decade old, hits significant problems if you introduce cellphones. Must be one of the latest cases, that; they were surely becoming solid in popular culture by the mid-nineties, even if they were still Something Expensive. [checks] Hmm; 1992... 11m cellphones in the US. Okay, so I was maybe thinking it was a few years later. But even so... She's embarrassed about that one. She said that for some of her more recent work, she tried to look more carefully at what was coming down the pipeline, and everything she didn't want to deal with, she had tied up in litigation. :-) -- MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. | |
#25
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Can cell phones and SPS share the same frequency?
In article ,
Andrew Gray wrote: You don't have to go back to the 70s to find this, either. The plot of Connie Willis's "Doomsday Book", which is only about a decade old, hits significant problems if you introduce cellphones. Must be one of the latest cases, that; they were surely becoming solid in popular culture by the mid-nineties, even if they were still Something Expensive. [checks] Hmm; 1992... 11m cellphones in the US. Okay, so I was maybe thinking it was a few years later. But even so... She's embarrassed about that one. She said that for some of her more recent work, she tried to look more carefully at what was coming down the pipeline, and everything she didn't want to deal with, she had tied up in litigation. :-) -- MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. | |
#26
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Can cell phones and SPS share the same frequency?
Andrew Gray writes:
Besides, adding cellphones would, if memory serves, have limited people's ability to Fail To Communicate. It's not a *proper* Willis novel if people don't Fail To Communicate ;-) Oh, I don't know about that... I can think of many times when I have had a great deal of difficulty communicating with someone via cellphone, e.g., when one of us was near the edge of a reception zone, was inside an especially metalliferous building, or simply was running low on batteries... So in fact, new technologies like cell phones provide people with all sorts of entirely new ways to Fail to Communicate --- why, just look at usenet !!! ;-I -- Gordon D. Pusch perl -e '$_ = \n"; s/NO\.//; s/SPAM\.//; print;' |
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