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As a lot of people have mentioned (some more politely than others), ham radio's appeal as a general-purpose communications service is pretty limited these days due to the sheer number of alternatives. It's still unbeatable in emergencies, but if emergency support isn't your thing, you may be left wondering what the point is.

That's a shame, because there is still some really-interesting stuff happening on the fringes. For the technically inclined, eBay has made it possible to obtain equipment and components for Amateur "homebrewing" that major military/commercial labs were damned lucky to have in the 70s and 80s. It is hard to overemphasize how cool that is. Even most hams don't realize that they can own better RF equipment and components than NASA had when they launched Voyager and Pioneer.

Ham radio gives you a great framework for engagement with every technology from software-defined radio to microwave communications to precision timekeeping. Build that DC-to-daylight receiver you've always wanted... the one the Feds won't let you buy off the shelf. Run your own "Amateur Deep Space Network" receiver site, or communicate with other people all over the world by bouncing your signal off the Moon. There is still more cool stuff to learn and do in Amateur Radio than you will ever have time to tackle... if you don't fall into the trap of thinking it's all a bunch of old farts carrying walkie-talkies around for no good reason. Like lawyers, 98% of hams give the rest a bad name.

There are a few links on my site (in the comment header) to various homebrew/experimental projects, but most of them are broken at the moment due to a hosting move that's taking way longer than it was supposed to. Anyone interested in the technical side of things is welcome to email me for advice and indoctrination. :-P

In short: some parts of ham radio have benefitted tremendously from the advent of the Internet; but yeah, it's also true that many of the other aspects are less relevant than ever. You get out of the hobby what you're willing to put into it.

I'm going to assume you actually aren't aware of what's going on, and that you're not deliberately trying to pretend, and supply you with some reading material. Please consider the following articles in support of my statements:

Let's start with the no-fly list:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/25/no_fl y/index_np.html
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/ 09/27/MNNOFLY.TMP&nl=top
http://www.globenet.free-online.co.uk/reports/prot estersdetained.htm
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/957183/po sts

This one's just fun: they barred Ted Kennedy (the senator):
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/19/senator_on _terror_watch/

And this one just basically says the No-Fly list is managed rather stupidly:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/07/aclu-suit/

Now lets look at the Patriot act:

First, this google search returns almost 3 million hits on patriot act abuses:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Patriot+Ac t%22+abuses&btnG=Google+Search

Here's a detailed analysis by the ACLU about what's wrong with the Patriot Act:
http://www.aclu.org//safefree/general/17203leg2003 0214.html

Here's a Register article about how the Patriot Act isn't being used against terrorists, but rather regular criminals (a group for which the act was not meant to be used, I'd consider that an abuse), side-stepping their civil liberties:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/05/22/us_antiter ror_law_used_against/

Here's an article about an interesting talk that went on at Harvard about the subject:
http://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/voices/2003 10/1010abuses.html

Here's a fun reprint of a Village Voice article about the NYPD seeking to spy on protestors and such:
http://www.refuseandresist.org/police_state/art.ph p?aid=619

I could go on and on, but I think I've made my point. The Patriot Act should be quietly killed off and our civil liberties re-affirmed.

Enjoy your readings...

> efforts to teach great apes more advanced languages have been remarkably successful.

Ummm...no.

In a small number of cases some primates have been trained to recognize (up to) a few hundred symbols. Grammatical structure? Never. It's a really far stretch to call that language.

Read about it:
http://www.garysturt.free-online.co.uk/gardner.htm

http://www.santafe.edu/~johnson/articles.chimp.htm l
" A chimp might learn to connect a hand sign with an item of food, skeptics like Dr. Terrace argued, but this could be a matter of simple conditioning, like Pavlov's dogs learning to salivate at the sound of a bell. Most importantly, there was no evidence that the chimps had acquired a generative grammar -- the ability to string words together into sentences of arbitrary length and complexity."

Similarly, I find myself unable to respect those that do not understand the difference between possesive and plural.

Oh noes! Teh bad grammar, it burns us!

Curse yoo Molesworth.

It is NOT working. It will NOT work correctly. NEVER. Some useful links: Article here
This one even dates before you're born (apparently, otherwise you'd be intelligent enough to make the difference between politics and science)
And here
If you can read more than 5mn in a row:
Here too

Similarly, Psychiatry/Psychology is bunk.

I agree, the only rational use for "Missile Defence" is offence.

People have been going on about how much this costs and how it will never work ever since Reagan's Start Wars. Technically, missile defence is too hard to implement and too easy to defeat. So are all these military spenders really that much more stupid than Joe Public? I doubt it.

Instead, offensive domination of space makes way more sense. Don't forget the earlier Shashdot articles on the Air Force's plans for space domination http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/0 8/180222&tid=103&tid=160 with lots of nifty weapons http://www.globenet.free-online.co.uk/slaw/lawofwa r.htm The best defense is a good offence.

I recall the dread of the Cold War when we (as high school students) were convinced that nuclear war was inevitable. There was a reprieve when the USSR fell, but now this administration wants to bring it back. The US scorns international treaties http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsContro l/Nuclear.asp and is determined to weaponize space.

Of the three nations in Bush's "Axis of Evil", one has been invaded, and the other two have (wisely) realized the only effective deterrent is nuclear weapons. I really don't blame Iran and N. Korea. They're paranoid and they should be. The US scares me too.

it will be really a defeat of humanity if the weapons make it to space. it's a one way street like the nuclear weapons. more over space debris from a war in space would trap us on earth.

here is our chance to stop this from happening:

"The Bush administration's Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is now calling for public comment on their Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for the Ballistic Missile Defense System. Public comment is due by November 17, 2004. People from all countries are urged to send comments." (see URL below for more details)

http://www.globenet.free-online.co.uk/articles/spa ce_is_for_peace.htm

"the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind;

outer space shall be free for exploration and use by all States;

outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means;

States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner"

Also check out space4peace.org

They should split the difference and change it to http://www.ripcat.free-online.co.uk/waitshtml/tomt raubertsblueslyrics.htm this.

I'm all for using these folks as our first conscripted astronauts in such a project.

How much material are we talking?

According to "Der rote Orbit" by Harro Zimmer, a book on the Soviet space program based on data released in the 1990s: There is about 940 kg of highly enriched uranium and more than 15 tons of radioactive material. The sattelites will stay about 600 years in orbit before coming down. Argon-39, mentioned in the article, will still be around then.

One exception is Kosmos 1900. On this RORSAT mission the core ejection was done later than usual due to a technical problem. Since the orbit was already very low then, the core was shot to an altitude of about 750 km, where it will only last about 100 years.

Will this be a major event to the earth, or will the upper atmosphere just shrug and eat it up?

This is unclear. There were two incidents in the RORSAT history where the reactor core re-entered Earth's atmosphere. Kosmos 1402 did not leave a radioactive trace while the infamous Kosmos 954 spacecraft certainly did.

There have been dozens of nuclear powered satellites launched by both USSR and USA. When the satellite reaches its end of life, the core is ejected into a higher orbit. The result of all this is there are several tonnes of nuclear waste and a few hunderd pounds of enriched uranium orbiting the Earth. You can read more about it here Nuclear Powered Space Missions

Has everyone already forgotten about Cosmos 954?

On 24 January 1978, COSMOS 954, a Soviet nuclear-powered surveillance satellite, crashed in the Northwest Territories. The crash scattered a large amount of radioactivity over a 124,000 square kilometre area in Canada's north, stretching southward from Great Slave Lake into northern Alberta and Saskatchewan.

And for a little history of Nukes in space.

- SR

While looking up the previous USA space fission reactor, I came across this interesting site: Nuclear Powered Space Missions - Past and Future.

The most interesting information here is about the accidents - which there have been a surprisingly large number of, including an incident in 1978 where a 20-25% of a Soviet fission reactor re-entered and was scattered across Canada.

I just hope they don't use this in space weaponry. Space should be kept international, such a beam weapon has the potential to do just that. Here is a link to the cause
-Seriv

In fact, only the USSR has ever placed radioactive material into an earth orbit The US Navy has sent 11 nuclear satellites into orbit so far. 7 remain in orbit, two burned up in orbit releasing the plutonium, and two reentered with RTG intact, although a lot of the information is classified, so we don't know for sure.

You are right though the USSR have put an enormous quantity of nuclear waste into orbit, a lot more than the US.

The US has only ever used plutonium for deep space missions that go beyond Martian orbit, Voyagers I&II, Galileo, and Cassini are some examples Don't forget the Viking missions had RTGs

Source

If the Europeans wanted to send a probe into deep space, they would do the exact same thing the Americans have done and use Plutonium.

Maybe they're just happy enough to restrict theirselves to what can be explored safely

Viking is nuclear powered.

I use free-online as my ISP in the UK. They are pretty cool, giving me 250MB of webspace, a shell account on a Redhat box for CGI (has gcc and other stuff installed), MySQL, Perl, PHP and support for Frontpage extensions (urm, maybe not so good). No ports blocked either, and I don't think they are against running servers :)

A good price too - much better than AOL broadband and that crap. I think that these folks are the uber geek-friendly ISP in the UK - I'm certainly very happy.

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Two things that bothered me:

• Hakul's dragon form shouldn't have had a wolf-head. Too reminiscent of Mononoke Hime, visually. I mean, a girl tending the wounds of a bleeding white wolf whose head is as large as her body? I've got a poster of the exact same scene.
• Disney's foley-musicians. I'm not 100% sure this was a mouse-corporation addition, but their fingerprints are all over it. Disney's got a crew of classical musicians who've practiced Peter and the Wolf a few too many times, and who like to synchronize musical tweeters to a character's every blink and gaze. During the scene where Chihiro is nervously descending the stairs, they go absolutely overboard and turn her into a full-fledged calliope.
  
  The same thing happened in Kiki's Delivery Service too- Kiki was descending a random staircase, and for no reason at all they decided it should play like a piano. They feel a need to stuff in extra stimulation to keep us Yanks in the seats.
  

On Friday, March 1st, 2002, two Californian Amateur Radio Operators communicated over 175.3 Km (almost 110 miles!) using home build 75 GHz equipment. You can find an article here. The fact that the military is not interested in this band might not be the difficulty of building the equipment, but the in the difficulty of operation and / or the reliability of the connection. Just my $0.02

There is an easy way to fix your problem with what you refer to as "the little spinny icon that is animated when a page is loading". Jayenkai's site has a piece of software which you can use to edit the Spinning Internet Explorer Logo Thingy, or SIELT for short. (I'm assuming here that you're using IE.)

I remember changing the 'provided by whoever' on Internet Explorer and Outlook Express to a more personalised "Provided by JonnySoft", though I can't for the life of me tell you what registry entries I changed. It's been a long time since I used OE... ;)

My personal preference is to use the Opera browser with Windows, instead of Netscape or IE. Although there is a fee if you want to use it without the banner ads, this is no big deal. It's got none of this 'provided by ComCast' crap, and it has no spinny thing, so to speak, for them to change.

As for the 'spyware' support tool, I suggest that you start logging everything that it sends out, if that's possible. I'm pretty sure that something like that could be illegal. Finally, if you're still annoyed at Comcast taking over your Windows box... use Linux instead, man. It's good for you ;)

6 Reversal of Earth's magnetic field

Poul Anderson wrote a story on this theme. The name escapes me.

8 Global epidemics

The novel Earth Abides and the BBC TV series Survivors (no cash prizes).

9 Global warming

Everything recent by Bruce Sterling, but especially Heavy Weather

10 Ecosystem collapse

A real popular category: Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, Wylie's The End of the Dream, and Streiber & Kunetka's Nature's End (not reflective of Streiber's recent UFO obsessions). There are many others, of course -- most of them pretty bad.

I'm fond of Spinrad's Riding the Torch, although this is more about the kind of humanity that ecodisaster might produce, not about the disaster itself.

11 Biotech disaster

The Death of Grass falls into this category, even though the technology Christopher warns about (traditional agriculture! it seems that most of our food crops are related to ordinary grass, and thus subject to the same diseases) is pretty primitive.

13 Nanotechnology disaster

A secondary theme in Stephenson's The Crystal Age.

15 Global war

I'm tempted to say that this theme died with the Cold War. But at least one writer (Eric Harry) seems to be making a living off the idea that It Could Still Happen. And of course, all the talentless technothriller authors manage to find minor countries (Argentina will rise again!) capable of setting off the Holocaust.

If there was ever a movie for Slashdotters, it's Doctor Strangelove. ("You can't condemn a system because of one little error!") The interesting thing about this movie is that it started out as an adaptation of a serious technothriller, Red Alert. But Kubrick found that he couldn't write about Armageddon without making jokes!

The movie Fail-Safe is worth mentioning, mainly because it's about a nuclear near-war triggered by technological failure. A good movie, but unfortunately based on a very bad book that happened to be a conspicuous rip-off of Red Alert. So Kubrick's lawyers kept it from getting a proper release.

16 Robots take over

David Brin has done some good stuff on this theme (an author I used to enjoy, before I realized that everything he writes is a sort of novelized flame war). Gregory Benford's Galatic Center series has some good points, but is hampered by an absence of focus -- and Benford's regretable tendency to read like a creative writing assignment.

It's interesting that the doyen of Robot SF never developed this theme. But maybe not suprising -- Asimov never really developed any serious understanding of computing, cypernetics, or robotics. His robot stories are really a combination of old-fashioned handwaving (can "don't kill people" really be made into a mathematical principle?) and social comentary (notice the stories where robots are addressed as "boy"!).

18 Alien invasion

Certainly more crap in this category than any other. V and Independence Day tell us that aliens will invade us to steal resources like minerals and water -- things they can obtain from solar and planetary rings and halos with much less trouble. Fortunately, Mars is uninhabited -- imagine the lawsuits if it weren't!

__________

As far as other unsubstatiated posts, well, this is slashdot after all. Had your post been more politely written, and not focused on casting my opinion as based on "childish rivalry" instead of the well-researched, informed standpoint that I, of course, hold it to be, I wouldn't have expected you to substantiate your opinion.

It boils down to this: Big Science means Big Money - taxpayers' money, at that. You appear to believe that manned space research gives approximately equal science-bang for tax-buck as an SSC or LHC project. You are welcome to your opinion; many other scientists have other opinions. Don't assume that, because they disagree with you, they're playing some silly Army-Navy rivalry game, especially when they may have already presented evidence to back up their opinion.

And, just FYI, I have had no stake in high energy physics since '94. It's all software these days, y'know... ;)

Anybody nostalgic for Blue Peter can check out my pinhole camera designs in case they want to get ready for the next one in 2081 CE.

If anyone is interested, I recorded how I got my first job in computing a couple of years ago at http://www.andrewcooke.fre e-online.co.uk/andrew/job.html (Preview seems to add a space in the middle of that, but the link works...)

Andrew