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There's indeed a 3SAT TV station. Not to be confused with the 3-SAT problem.

At least I know of the Linux4Africa project from a very positive news report on a fairly popular computer show on TV here in Germany. The project has already shipped several containers of fully functional donated computers to schools and institutions in Africa. http://www.linux4afrika.de/ I can't help with any international footage. Those who do speak German can check out the rather old video online: http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/content/Linux_fuer_Afrika/219376 Or anyone dare to run this site through an online translator: http://www.3sat.de/neues/sendungen/magazin/112048/index.html I think one of the main reasons why there is such a ruckus about sending free computers to Africa is that the major nations are afraid of even more dirt cheap labor. Right now China and India are sucking huge amounts of resources into their boom and we can hardly keep up with our tiny countries. If someone started that Genesis device of economy in Africa with a kick of free technology this global system would surely collapse. At least what we know of it's power distribution right now.

Yahoo has several videos on Pelamis.

Another technology using waves/currents to produce energy is an under water turbine using two rotors, delivering up to 1MW. This company already has single rotor turbines in use.

extra: why not use your sewage to produce energy?
Rabtherm English translation
press article English translation

- the public TV programmes are of good quality. Maybe not appealing to all viewers, but it is clear that care has been put in making them. - some commercial TV programmes like RTL are not that bad, but the amount of commercials (and especially the length of commercial blocks) is awful.

I guess we need to distinguish what kind of shows we compare. If we're to compare entertainment (movies, TV serials), most of the time the big commercial channels have better things to offer.

But when it comes down to information, no commercial channel (not even the news channels) has such a wide and good variety of shows as the public channels. And if you move your attention over from the two "big" public channels to the smaller ones like Phoenix, 3SAT, arte you'll find documentations that no commercial channel will ever produce because the number of people interested in those topics will be way to low or the content documantary will be to radical for any promoter who's willing to buy ad space in a show.

And those are exactly the kind of shows this fee was originally intended for. Of course, like anything else invented in good will, it has degraded over the years.

Kurt2: http://www.ais.fraunhofer.de/KURT2/
Kurt3D: http://www.ais.fraunhofer.de/ARC/kurt3D/
        Videomaterial available.

Seen on German television on November 27, 2003
http://www.3sat.de/nano/cstuecke/53575/index.html [in german]

Although that the AmigaOne-XE is currently relative expensive compared to PC hardware, this is mainly due relatively low expected volume sales as the AmigaOne-XE board is mainly targeted at the current Amiga communnity of powerusers and developers. Therefor sales aren't expected to reach more than a few thousand. There are significant development costs for designing the hardware and well as the software which comes with it (such as the 30 months of hard work for AmigaOS4).

Also any hardware company can negotiate a license for AmigaOS4 (however currently PPC only) and offer an Amiga branded product. The classic Amiga market has been moving to standard mainstream hardware for more than a decade now and so this process seems to be just a natural continuation of this.

There are hardware offerings in the pipeline designed by Eyetech and Mai Logic which will be targeted at larger markets, opening up the possibility of cheaper solutions. First up is the MicroA1 which is a Mini-ITX (17cm - 17cm!) form factor board and is already being demonstrated running Linux and AmigaOS4.

The AmigaOne-XE and AmigaOS4 Developer pre-release is already an excellent product for developers to start developing for AmigaOS4. As a development platform the current AmigaOne-XE solution is relatively cheap (especially compared to Mai's Teron evaluation boards, the boards Seehund likes to rave about as being so "cheap" (also coming without an AmigaOS4 license).

The new Amiga platform is already gaining widespread coverage. Yesterday AmigaOS4 was the highlight of a German TV show (3SAT/ZDF) demonstrating the product. You can download the show from here or go here for more information.

"good luck convincing anyone to go to ground 0 and clean it up (rather than forcing them to do it at gunpoint.)"

If anything, they're not going to just redo the on-site concrete-pooring again, it will be more some sort of prefab rapid construction.

For example: babelfish translated from 3sat.de: Some smart people have been working on that.

... Microsoft has recently added BMW boss Helmut Panke to its board of directors [1] - a move to get more insight into the German political system?

And a German Member of Parliament, Ekin Deligoz, recently said (on TV) that she thought it was frightening "if you think about how much money Microsoft invests into their parliament work". [2]

Both links in German language only, unfortunately:
[1] Heise
[2] 3sat

There it is. "Open Source Hardware" by the "Bangalore Seven" Simputer Trust.

Back at home, all I had to do was to buy a sat receiver, an 80cm dish, a small motor and the 'converter' (whatever that was called, which goes into the dish's focus point), and I was able to get hundreds of channels:

• High quality stuff, like German-Austrian-Swiss 3sat
• programs in all kind of languages, from Finnish to Turkish (not that I speak those, but between English, German, French, Italian and Spanish, I had some choice of multi-lingual programming :-P)
• best of all: I did not have to subscribe to any service, no monthly fee etc.

I don't want to start a flame-war: I just want a similar service here in the USA while I am here. How can I get it?

Or is it so that, in a similar fashion as for cellphones in the USA, I have to pay even for things which are (or should be) paid for already by someone else?

thanks for any detailed help.

PS: what I mean with the cellphone comparison is:

• I don't see why I should pay for TV movies interrupted by many commercials: I either pay by watching the commercials, or I don't want to see them inbetween movies. Not both.
• Likewise, I don't want to pay for someone else's phone calls: if someone wants to call my phone, I don't see why I should be paying for it (as if I were asked to pay for incoming calls on my home phone, d'oh)

PPS: I don't want to mess with sat dishes larger than 1m for that, nor to spend more than $300 total for the whole rig (as I'd do in EU).

so it is and i think it is in the queue.

a week ago i saw a (german) telecast (nano on 3sat) about adaptronic. the essence of this technology is to create materials that react to deformation in an intelligent way. one application mentioned was to counteract vibration which is the cause for most of the noise produced by vehicles.

one idea is to use piezo-electric wires in composite materials which act as sensors . the produced signals hold information about the deformation. after an analysis, apropriate electric current is put back through the wires and cause a deformation, which counterbalances the first one.