I would really like to know what happens when Im driving down a highway at say 60mph and browsing the web on my smartphone (or well let's say my wife is doing the driving and Im browsing the web :-) ). What kind of communication is happening between me and the cellphone towers? What data is my phone sending to the different cellphone towers as I drive by them? How does the cellphone tower send that data to the internet? Does someone have a good pointer to a resource that would answer these questions?

Almost everything is exactly the same as on your desktop computer. The only thing that's different is what goes on under your TCP/IP layers.

Your Phone has a modem built in, that modulates a digital signal over a carrier wave at a certain frequency (set of frequencies, depending on the channel access protocol) the modulated carrier wave is sent out to the cellphone tower.

When the modem is supposed to receive, when it's allowed to send, how it negotiates these things is all strictly defined by protocols the telecom industry has standardized on. I can't say I'm an expert on these protocols, there's a whole bunch of them. They are grouped in protocol stacks with familiar names like GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, LTE.

These protocols besides making optimal use of their available bandwidth taking into account all kinds of noise, disturbances, moving from tower to tower, other phones also specify how the communication should be encrypted.

The encoding/decoding of these protocols is usually done by an integrated circuit in your phone that's separate from the rest of the phone's functionality, to prevent you from tampering with it (and to ensure reliability I guess). So all your phone's general operating system has to do is interface with that circuit to get neat IP packets.

Like tinco said, above TCP/IP it's pretty much the same as on your desktop. If you want to know about TCP/IP and below, I suggest this title: "From GSM to LTE-Advanced: An Introduction to Mobile Networks and Mobile Broadband".

http://www.amazon.com/From-GSM-LTE-Advanced-Introduction-Bro...

Jiminy crickets!

Well, once you get past the interrupt stuff, the handset establishes a pdp context.... How many people can afford to hire deep mobile hackers?

Could someone point to a resource that would explain what happens when Im viewing a website on my phone driving down the highway?

What does my cellphone send to the nearest cell-phone tower? What does the cell-phone tower send to the phone company servers? How do they tie back together packets coming back from https://news.ycombinator.com back to my phone?

If it's you driving, you put down the phone and pay attention to the road. :)

Your Lord revealed to the bees: "Build dwellings in the mountains and the trees, and also in the structures which men build. Then eat from every kind of fruit and travel the paths of your Lord, which have been made easy for you to follow." From their bellies issues a drink of varying hues, containing healing for mankind. Indeed in this is a sign for people who think.

from the Koran chapter 16 entitled "The Bee".

Wow, at one level that's quite beautiful as it's sort of saying "the sum of all living things equals health for humanity". I generally don't dig the humans vs. everybeing else distinction in monotheistic philosophies, though.

Just pursue what you think is cool or interesting to you, learn about it and write about it. Creativity doesn't have to be completely original. If you write about your own learning experiences with projects of interest to you, that scratch your own itch, Im sure it will be interesting, even valuable to a few people.

i'm too dumb to pursue anything that I find interesting, it seems.

Very cool! This makes working with HTML such a breeze: http://emacsrocks.com/e12.html

"do I file an issue with the emacs developers hoping it is voted on enough to make into the next version? Hell no! This is emacs. I fix it myself!"

I started with LYAH loved the first 6 chapters. Got bogged down on the 7th because it was more abstract. Now Im reading both LYAH and Real World Haskell and reading both makes a great combination. If I get bogged down in one the other keeps my momentum going.

I love LYAH, I think for learning Haskell, LYAH is the best intro, better than Real World Haskell. And at first I thought LYSE would be a sort of 1:1 mapping of LYAH, but no, LYSE treats it subject matter to a much wider breadth. There are like 20 extra chapters! And the "Don't drink too much Kool Aid" sections are a nice feature, not a lot of books call out the hype about something and give you the real low-down. Quite refreshing to get a realistic, pragmatic view instead.

Thanks to the author for making it available for free online. Im going to go purchase my copy now.

What, no Gandalf chasing a Balrog down the hole?!