Robert Yanal offers a resolution to the paradox by denying the third premise, that repeaters feel genuine suspense on repeated encounters with familiar narratives.
The first scrutinises multiple streams of data arriving from satellites and ground repeaters (which help boost weak signals), then decides how best to reassemble them.
There have even been grumblings from the Ultra Wide Band (UWB) community developers of a new wireless broadband technology who argue that the repeaters could disrupt their own 2.5 gigahertz transmissions.For the time being, the FCC has sided with XM Radio and Sirius.
Objectors point to Boston, where XM Radio has set up 66 repeaters, giving it the option of establishing that many independent radio stations should it desire.In the United States, Edward Fritts, the president of the National Association of Broadcasters, has made this an issue.
The worry is that if satellite radio founders, the 1,500 or so repeaters perched on hill tops and tall buildings could easily be rerigged to broadcast local content.
Protests have also come from big providers of mobile-phone services, including AT&T, WorldCom and BellSouth, who claim that the terrestrial repeaters could interfere with reception of future data services planned for their wireless networks.
Last September, the regulatory agency granted both companies temporary licences to operate their repeaters in areas where a satellite signal might be blocked.
What Dr Shields did was to work out a way of subtracting the noise, and thus extracting the signal.Such a photon counter is essential if quantum cryptography is to work, because it will allow what are known as quantum repeaters to be built.
Out of the 490,000 candidates, the number of repeaters was slashed from 60,000 last year to only 6,000 this year.
CDNs can be thought of as repeaters, stationed strategically to help manage the Internet traffic by avoiding the backbone or by finding intelligent routes through it.
Thus if a replication fails, it could be because the repeaters didn't quite get these je-ne-sais-quoi bits of the protocol right.Taken to extremes, this leads to what Dr Collins calls "the experimenter's regress"—you can say an experiment has truly been replicated only if the replication gets the same result as the original, a conclusion which makes replication pointless.
